


the marriage plot

by viviandarkbloom



Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: F/F, non-canon shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:28:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22719178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: Looking back before looking forward to the new episodes: A remix/re-imagining of series 2/episode 5 in which our Heroines' wedding planning goes seriously sideways.
Relationships: Caroline McKenzie-Dawson/Original Female Character(s), Gillian Greenwood/Caroline McKenzie-Dawson
Comments: 268
Kudos: 213





	1. the inferno, or how I learned to stop worrying and use fire as a coping mechanism

**Author's Note:**

> In which we have already established:
> 
> 1\. Katie Dingo is still evil, but just as we can't blame Gillian for being irresistible, we cannot blame her for this either even though she planted the seed. 
> 
> 2\. I have no self-control and instead of writing other things in progress I start something new. We can actually blame me for this. 
> 
> 3\. I have no compunction about stealing titles of novels I've not read. Apologies to Jeffrey Eugenides.

_Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to be in an institution?_

—H.L. Mencken

In the immaculate household of Caroline Eliot, a manuscript fragment sits humbly on the spotless kitchen table: Thirty poorly edited pages from her husband’s latest literary effort, a bastardization of Caroline’s mother’s late-in-life romance with a pleasant, twinkly-eyed codger who just happened to spawn a sullen shepherdess with the body of a teenaged boy—the description alone summons to mind a fabulous monster out of Greek mythology, part woman, part boy, part sheep, what would it be called? A hermaphrovine?—who is for some godforsaken reason the protagonist of this magnum opus about old people and who possesses the sex appeal of Bathsheba Everdene, the thwarted, simmering anguish of Madame Bovary, and the maturity level of Tigger.

Briefly Caroline chastises herself for being too hard on Gillian; it cannot be entirely her fault that she’s irresistible to a sizable spectrum of knobheads. 

Blue scrawl from a fountain pen—given to the ingrate writer as a birthday gift six years ago—swims here and there over the Palatino typeface, coheres uneasily into phrases like _rework into chapter 7_ or _did I say this before?_ This particular section provides dreary exposition on the protagonist’s pathetic marriage to a lesbian heifer who is rubbish in bed: _She approached the act of love as if it were a noble sacrifice—she, a virginal Joan of Arc tied to a phallic pyre._ Well. Caroline didn’t know what the hell a phallic pyre was, but it did give her notions of anointing her estranged husband’s favorite moleskin trousers with his preferred whiskey and depositing a match upon the sodden spot, and preferably with him in said item of clothing. Pyromania seems the only satisfying and correct answer to all current calamities of life. She wants to burn everything down, every inch of her life reduced to indescribably dead ash. All of it.

The mobile rings. Coincidentally it is Gillian, just as Caroline’s eyes pass over a particularly turgid phrase: _Is it any wonder that after so many years of flaccid flesh, the burgeoning arrow of his desire would turn to a boyishly handsome shepherdess?_

Of course, this must be the first thing that flies out her mouth when she accepts the call: “Hello, boyishly handsome shepherdess.”

Unsurprisingly, the response is a startled, mumbled, “What?”

Which makes Caroline feel guilty for once again, if indirectly, bringing up the indelicate matter of the boyish shepherdess drunkenly shagging her idiot husband. That doesn’t matter anymore. If she were completely honest with herself, she would admit that the marriage was more or less done before Gillian even came on the scene; it was mortally wounded the moment she laid eyes on Kate. It is, however, with abundant ease that she summons a more valid and compelling reason for taking the piss with her raggedy stepsister: Gillian is responsible for very stupidly volunteering them both to arrange their parents’ upcoming and completely unnecessary wedding, and the mere thought of tending to such duties requisite of the shitty institution of matrimony burns a hole of rancor in a mad lesbian heifer heart encased in a sad sack of flaccid flesh.

Before Caroline can even say a word, Gillian launches into babble mode. “Look. Um, Caz—I mean, sorry, Caroline—I know this is, um, all my fault, completely, totally, utterly. I just—you know, wanted to make things up to my dad, and do something nice for him and your mum, but I know, I really, really put my foot in this time, I shouldn’t have volunteered—“

“No,” Caroline retorts crisply. “You shouldn’t have bloody volunteered _me_ —”

“Us.”

“— _me_ to arrange our parents’ wedding.”

“I know, but, but I’ll help. I mean, we’re in the shitter together, you know?”

“Scarcely makes me feel better.” Caroline places John’s manuscript pages in the sparkling, empty kitchen sink. She stares at them.

“You still there?” Gillian’s voice inches up into an anxious octave.

“Yeah. You free tomorrow?”

“Can manage it.”

From a drawer, Caroline retrieves a cooking torch, last used to make crème brulee for John on his birthday nearly a year ago. “Good. I have an idea.”

“Oh?”

“Requires a bit of a road trip. I’ve a venue in mind. Thought we could research it—visit, get some information, have a spot of lunch there. You game?”

With a touch of a button, the torch caramelizes the manuscript quite nicely as it curls, darkens, and bursts into flames and in this moment of glorious destruction her blood sings with the ecstatic, worshipful glee of the twin fairies in the Mothra movies, in fact, Caroline wishes she had portable singing fairies she could cart around with her as she wreaks havoc upon the unforgiving world, and hopefully they would not sing that dreadful song that her mum always plays on her birthday, _Sweet Caroline kiss my fucking ass Neil Diamond,_ she rather hopes they’d come up with an original composition to honor her—but Gillian is mumbling something now, so Caroline dials back in to reality.

“Well,” Gillian replies uneasily. “S-should mention—I’m a bit short on cash these days—”

The fire rises. _Should I be concerned?_ “Don’t worry about that.”

“Can’t have you paying for me.”

“Consider it a loan. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll need a tractor fixed or I’ll need a sheep—”

“Why would you own a tractor or need sheep?”

“Gillian, don’t be literal. It’s tedious.”

“All right, then. It’s a date.”

“A date?” Caroline cannot help but tease.

Gillian squawks uneasily, a warning cackle masquerading as a laugh, a bit of ambivalent vocal camouflage as if she were a fat pigeon in the crosshairs of a roving feral cat and trying to convince said feline she’s actually a hawk. “J-just kidding—ha! I mean, HA! That would be a spectacle, wouldn’t it? You and me? D-d-dating? HA!”

“What, am I not good enough for you?” Caroline jokes. If this surly mess of a woman—does she _ever_ comb her hair?—wrapped in ancient flannel thinks she can do better, Caroline would sure as hell like to hear about it. For now she is merely content to indulge in her favorite pastime of Poke the Homophobe, and additionally grateful that Gillian does not recoil in horror the way that her husband and mother do; Gillian’s particular brand of bias appears more of a casual, kneejerk homophobia learned in school, probably from a gaggle of peroxided and perm’ed teenage fembots terrified of their own bodies and desires.

In response, Gillian stumbles over various syllables—“oh, ah, um—” until Caroline’s fire alarm detector, bleating and screeching with relentless intensity, saves her. “Shit, did you burn something?”

“Yes. My husband’s literary hopes and dreams. See you tomorrow morning at eleven sharp. Wear something suitable, would you?” Before Gillian can even think about dropping an f-bomb in her ear, she ends the call.

The yawping fire alarm has attracted the attention of the guesthouse occupants, who can only run so fast—even when they believe one of their own is in a dire, life-threatening circumstance, and the thought of rescue is more than she can expect from her own son, who is upstairs attached to the umbilical cord of some fancy noise-canceling/thought-murdering overpriced headphones.

Finally, her mother and Alan burst through the front door. As they both stare slack-jawed at the raft of smoke hovering over the sink, Caroline turns on the faucet and delivers the coup de grace to a heteronormative fantasia. It is more than mere symbolic gesture; she is well and truly done.

Celia finally sputters it out: “What in the eff are you doing?”

“Oh. You know.” Caroline wipes her hands on a towel. “Just offering some constructive criticism, is all.”

Coughing, Alan peers at the smoldering paper char in the sink. “Remind me never to show you m’ limerick notebook.”


	2. what is French for fucking knobhead?

A burst of sunlight slants through the bright, airy dining room at the hotel. Caroline tips back the wine list. “Fancy sharing a bottle?”

Gillian takes a break from the extremely urgent task of nibbling her fingernails and attempts to un-hunch her slim shoulders; with the cautious assent of a sad child promised sweets, she nods gratefully.

If Caroline had hoped that Gillian’s companionship on this outing would prove a mutually beneficial relaxing distraction, she is, so far, sadly mistaken. As the hotel became visible on the drive here, Gillian unleashed a raspberry of _pfft,_ followed by _fuck, that looks posh_ and then gazing nervously at her old, scuffed heels and a dress that has seen better days. Once inside she gawped—well, like a sheep farmer who hadn’t set foot in a hotel probably since a childhood visit to Brighton—and twitched to the extent that Caroline feared she would have a meltdown in in the lobby not unlike the demon child in _the Omen_ did when dragged into a church.

A good meal and a couple glasses of wine, she hopes, will set Gillian to rights. Hell, Caroline thinks, it would probably do her a bit of good as well, so why not go for a bottle? She has made worse decisions in her life: 1985’s perm, 1992’s attempt at eating haggis, not to mention the more epic fuckups like marrying John, and, most recently, completely bollocking the weekend she was here with Kate. She needed a bottle of wine—nay, she deserved a bottle of wine.

“Red or white?”

“Either’ll do me fine.” Gillian gulps down half a glass of water.

“I’m thinking white.”

“Sounds grand.” 

The debacle of the breakup with Kate had led her through the five stages of relationship grief: groveling, bargaining, tears, ice cream, booze. Like any good student, she moved through this brutal coursework with an ease that indicated no actual retention of knowledge or suggestion of growth; just a brief, blowsy acknowledgement of the stages, as if encountering a coworker’s spouse at a cocktail party. Each stage has had an attendant mood: self-loathing, sadness, depression, anger. Here she is poised to embark upon the last boozy stage while fueled on the fumes of pure resentment.

When they first arrived today, she had herself shuddered dramatically when they walked through the lobby, which prompted reluctant recall of that disastrous weekend: the cowardly stupidity of the separate rooms, the shitty dinner with Greg. The worst part, of course, was the cold, cruel fury of Kate’s words distilling their relationship into something as toxic and distasteful as rancid vinegar: _an odd mess, a couple of embarrassed fumbles._ It cannot possibly be coincidental or insignificant that in the two most important relationships of her life, both parties have declared her romantically insufficient and sexually inadequate.

Using the wine list as a shield from Gillian’s steady gaze, she sighs. Why even fucking bother, then? Why not live out one’s life as a nun? The reverberations of coming out—rather, dragged out in her case—have, however, plunged through a seriously repressed mind and body in desperate need of reawakening, precipitating an avalanche of epic sexual proportions that have loosened all sorts of emotional silt, and consequentially altering her arid psychological landscape. She allows herself to want. She wants to give and receive pleasure in equal measure, she wants to be appreciated not just as a mother or a teacher or a preternaturally efficient majordomo, but also as a woman.

The waiter—dark-haired, boyishly handsome—makes a perfectly timed appearance. As Gillian gives him the onceover, her eyebrows make an appreciative wagging overture that he studiously ignores. “Would you ladies like to start off with something to drink?”

“Yes.” Authoritative Caroline places the menu on the table. “A bottle of the Viognier, please.”

He blinks. “Which one, please?”

Caroline freezes. She thought there was only one on the menu, and that was largely why she chose it: So that she could simply order by varietal of grape and not risk butchering any long foreign names because when it comes to French, she stumbles though the language with the paralyzing shame of a public pervert caught hiding in a park hedge.

But Gillian, the most unexpected of saviors, intervenes. She glances down at the wine list, and French flows out of her mouth: “Do you mean the 2014 Georges Vernay Condrieu Les Chaillees de l'Enfer?”

Now it is Caroline’s turn to gape like a country yokel. This rough, foul-mouthed, flannel-wearing, kebab-burping, mud-caked-Wellie-wearing farmer who usually has her hands in the guts of a tractor or the arse of a sheep caresses the French language with such effortless sensuality that a delicious shiver of something that she fears is desire presses against her spine, and with such intensity that she straightens and nearly floats up out of her chair.

Both the server and Gillian await the queen’s decision.

Caroline clears her throat. “Yes. That one.”

“Very good.” The server scoops up the list, dematerializing as if beamed away into a _Star Trek_ franchise.

“I picked the cheaper one,” Gillian says. “Figured that’s what you wanted. Th’ other one were like seventy quid—not saying you’re cheap, mind, but—”

Caroline blurts it out: “You speak French.”

“Oh.” A self-conscious shrug, a nervous smile. “Yeah. Well, not really. It were the only subject I did well in, in school. Don’t know why. Reckon it’s stuck a bit.” 

In the long, winding course of her career, Caroline has known her share of students who leave school for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s the right decision for the student, sometimes not. In the case of Gillian, though, the thought of this lost, viable potential—what could have been—makes her wince visibly.

She can’t help but blunderingly admit it. “That’s something. I mean, you could’ve been—a translator, a teacher—”

“‘Could’ve been a sailor, could’ve been a cook,’” Gillian sings.

Another minor surprise: She knows her Nick Drake too. Caroline laughs. “Maybe not a singer, though.”

“Nope,” Gillian agrees cheerfully, and the transformative effect of her unexpected smile is not lost on Caroline. She isn’t a bad-looking woman, certainly, and while the dress she wears is at least a decade out of fashion, it’s pleasing on her—not something Caroline would be caught dead in, of course, but the colorful havoc of the pattern complements the multivalent gleam of her green-blue eyes, and _now is not the time for you to think that this walking disaster of a woman is hot_.

Yes, now she allows herself to want, to glory in appreciation of all kinds of attractive women: A counterperson at Marks and Spencer, a colleague at a symposium, the DHL delivery woman who prompted a porny mid-morning fantasy all while she pretended to listen to Celia talk about what _really_ ought to go in a proper fruit salad—all fine and well, but this woman sitting across the table from her, a sodding sheep farmer who is her stepsister, is a bird too far.

Arrival of the Vigonier gallantly rescues Caroline from the teeming chaos of her thoughts. “Oh thank God,” she blurts.

“Am I that boring?” Gillian jokes uneasily.

The server uncorks the bottle and gives Caroline the first pour. “Not at all. In fact, you’re full of surprises.” She sips, gives a nod of approval, and he fills the glasses.

Gillian snorts and quickly downs half a glass. “You want to talk about someone who’s full of surprises? There’s your mum. Had no idea she had a sister. So what’s all this bother between them anyway?”

Caroline proceeds to share all intel concerning Celia’s mysteriously fractious relationship with her sister, Miriam. Food arrives, is consumed, and the watermark of the wine bottle falls ever lower. The increasingly easy flow of their conversation, the meal, the drink, and the warmth of the fading sunlight through the window mellows her out considerably, rendering her as relaxed as she gets in a public space. The drawbridge of her interior defenses drop with a resounding clang, announcing to the feudal estate of her brain that chaos now rules the land and she, a lesbian Rapunzel stuck in a tower for untold years, may be free to roam the land and ogle her comely peasant stepsister, who gesticulates passionately with her lovely hands while complaining bitterly about some fellow who outbid her on a ewe at an auction a month ago.

The anecdote complete, Gillian sighs, and sends the contents of her wineglass spinning about in a glimmering whirligig. “This is all a bit mad, innit it?”

Caroline, who had been in a comfortable wine-slouch, fearfully sits up. Recently Gillian had bragged about having a sexual sixth sense, of knowing instinctively when someone is interested in her. The last thing she needs is Gillian focusing this truffle pig sensitivity onto her and then boasting to all within hearing—that is, their entire combined family—that she, the renowned Bathsheba Bovary or whatever the fuck John calls her in the book, is irresistible to lesbians too. “What?”

“My dad, your mum getting married like this. Spending all this money. I mean, they already got married. Why not, you know, go on honeymoon? Or just save it? Or if they’re really so, so keen on buying some p-place to live—”

The telltale stammer, always indicative of Gillian’s emotional sore spots, makes its first appearance of the day. That Caroline wants to smooth out this stammer somehow—if only it could be easily done, like running a hand over a bit of fabric—marks a minor yet significant shift in their relationship. For her, anyway.

“I see your point, but if that’s what they want—” Caroline shrugs. The sexy wine-bearing waiter, a Ganymede of the Calderdale, returns, picks up the wine, and tops them off. The bottle is done.

Hawkish Gillian watches him retreat. “I think he likes me.”

“I think he’s angling for a big tip.”

“Oi. Like the Americans say, don’t harsh my buzz.”

“Right.”

“But seriously, make sure you give him a good tip.”

Caroline snorts derisively. The thought of Gillian ruining this perfect outing by mucking about with some waiter is disheartening. _Perfect_ —the thought echoes. Why do I find this afternoon so perfect? she wonders. Despite the underlying reason for their visit, no sense of obligation pins her down; no masks, no performances are required to please or charm. She realizes that this is what she likes best about being with Gillian, that she can be so much more herself than with any other person and Gillian simply accepts it, accepts her, and with a surprising, almost astonishing grace that makes Caroline wonder whatever she did to deserve it.

“Maybe I can get his number.”

“Christ’s sake, Gillian. After everything you went through with that bloke Pat Jindahar—”

“Not his name.”

“—have you not learned any lessons whatsoever about the potential complications and outright dangers of picking up random young men?”

“Clearly not,” Gillian huffs into a sadly empty wineglass.

“Look, we don’t need any shaggings in the wind right now—we have to do, you know, grown-up things now—” Gillian’s raucous cackling carries quite easily through the sedate dining area. Under normal sober circumstances Caroline would be irritated and embarrassed. Instead, she grins. “Why are you laughing?”

“It just sounds funny—‘shaggings in the wind.’”

“Oh.” Caroline starts giggling too. “I guess it does.” Then she accuses: “Are you drunk?”

“Fuck you, no, I’m not drunk.” Gillian bursts into a fresh round of sputtering laugher.

“Why are you still laughing, then?”

“Why are _you_ laughing?”

“You started it.”

“‘The answer, my friend, is shagging in the wind, the answer is shagging in the wind—’”

Now Caroline laughs as loudly as her companion. “Jesus, we’ve got to pull it together before—”

“Before they kick us out?”

“No, before—before—”

Caroline is about to say _before they come get us_ —referring not to coppers but whatever on-staff wedding planner the hotel plans to throw at them. Upon arrival, the wet-eared young bloke at the front desk had promised to send along someone to meet them after they finished lunch.

It is at this very unpropitious moment that the wedding planner stands in front of their table, and if Caroline’s lascivious lizard brain were somehow connected to a 3-d printer capable of generating her perfect fantasy woman, that creation would no doubt approximate the very real, live woman now towering over her: Statuesque, glowing brown skin, striking hazel eyes, short, curly black hair, and a generous, sensual mouth that curves easily into a smile.

“Pardon me.” The wedding planner’s words wash over Caroline in delicious, softly accented English. “Are you the two ladies enquiring about wedding facilities?”

While fully aware of the galvanizing affect the woman has on her, Caroline is just as acutely conscious of the panoply of reactiveness that is Gillian: Leaning back, she too admires the woman’s beauty—surely not with the same lusty appreciation as Caroline, but with an added inquisitiveness that hints as something beyond mere aesthetic appreciation. Then she glances at Caroline, reading the desire plainly written across her stepsister’s face.

Then Gillian grins broadly, and in the lingering afterglow of that smile, Caroline cannot—or does not—want to decode the strange but fleeting, yearning expression on her face.

Additionally Caroline cannot, does not fathom what Gillian does next: Smiling up at the beautiful woman, she leans across the table and gently lays her hand atop Caroline’s, her thumb lazily, possessively swishing over smooth knuckles and translucent veins.

Perhaps not unlike the farmer who outbid her on the prized ewe, Gillian smirks with wicked pride. “Yeah, we are.”

“Oh, lovely!” The woman clasps her hands together eagerly. “Congratulations to you both.”

“Thank you very much,” Gillian purrs.

Paralyzed and unable to get the simplest, bluntest _what the fuck_ out of her mouth, Caroline instead waits for her head to explode. Or somebody’s head to explode. Surely there will be an explosion of some sorts, she thinks, that signifies the end of the world is imminent.

“Tell me, love,” Gillian prattles on. “What’s your name?”

“Lucia.”

“You wouldn’t happen to be French, Lucia?”

“ _Bien sûr._ ” Lucia smiles broadly. “Born and raised in Lyon. I must say, Ms.—”

“Call me Gillian.”

“Gillian, I will tell you that many English people here do not identify my accent correctly.”

“ _Quelle absurdité_!” Gillian exclaims in mock horror as Caroline’s wine-soused libido suddenly decides that both women are, in equal measure and yet in their own fabulously distinct ways, exquisitely arousing.

Lucia’s laugh, a shimmering manifesto of sheer pleasure, cascades over them.

“You know,” Gillian says, “we’re so, so excited by the idea of getting married here, I can’t tell you—I mean, I feel like celebrating and it’s not even the day of yet!” She casts such a smoldering glance at her fake bride-to-be that if a minister waltzed in and offered to marry them this very instant, Caroline would swoon, consent, and ask for Lucia as a wedding present. “What do you say, darling? Should we get a bottle of champagne?”

Acutely aware that there is now no way in hell she can get off this ride—nor does she want to, frankly—Caroline nods slowly. Then with two simple words, she curtly confirms to Lucia that they won’t settle for some half-assed sparkling wine, and coincidentally these two words are among the few bits of French that she can utter with unshakable confidence, with the assured, haughty fierceness of the grande dame who bestowed her name and standing upon one of the best champagne houses in the world: “Veuve Cliquot.”

“ _Bien sûr_ ,” Lucia replies, with a slight bow of the head that is French for _mad respect, yo._

Having wreaked such delicate havoc in the most unexpected fashion, Gillian, the Puck of the Calder Valley, appears quite pleased with herself. What is French for fucking knobhead? Caroline thinks, and while hoping to somehow telepathically convey this to her motherpucker of a stepsister. 

Alas, the message doesn’t take. With queenly repose, Gillian leans back in her chair. “Fuck yeah, _bien sûr_!”


	3. the tragic goalkeeper

In a quiet corner of the hotel’s long bar, Caroline sits on a creaky antique divan with several glossy brochures splayed in her lap. She would rather that the comely Lucia were similarly arranged in her lap, just as she wishes that her closest companion of the moment, the Veuve Cliquot bottle, were full of sparkling ambrosia and not sadly empty.

Across a low table cluttered with empty glasses and other wedding ephemera sit Lucia and Gillian, the latter talking shite to the former. How Gillian ended up in close proximity to the goddess is something Caroline chalks up to her pathetically slow lesbian-heifer reflexes. Occasionally she has flashbacks to her indentured servitude in PE class—forced to be the footy goalkeeper, the ball always arcing gracefully above her head or spinning merrily out of reach, and the teacher always bellowing, _tragic, Dawson, tragic!_

Now she finds herself in a similar situation: literally outmaneuvered. She has no idea what Gillian is whispering into Lucia’s ear; all she knows is that she should be the one poring a slurry of praise, poetry, and exultations in the fractal perfection of that outer ear, all right, maybe not poetry but perhaps the equation for, say, sodium polyacrylate— _no, you idiot, science is not sexy, how many times do you have to see someone’s eyes glaze over before you realize this?_

Lucia’s loud laugh sends her bosom joyously convulsing—and Caroline would gladly brain her bloody idiot stepsister with the champagne bottle save for the certain fact that Gillian’s head is harder and thicker than the iceberg that took out the _Titanic_. So while she has been looking at costs, dates, plans, packages and emailing the relevant information to her mother, Gillian flirts away with indiscriminate, infuriating ease. What the hell was she up to? What was she trying to prove?

“I’m all right leaving most of the decision-making to Caz—” Gillian is saying to Lucia.

I will kill her, Caroline thinks.

“—or, as I call her, my little pooh bear—”

_I will kill her. No one will miss her. Alan already says he thinks of me as his own daughter so that’s sorted, instant upgrade there._

“But,” Gillian says emphatically, “I’ve decided that the first song we dance to as a married couple will be ‘Hungry Like the Wolf.’”

Lucia sips demurely at her champagne. “I am afraid I do not know that one.”

“Duran Duran?”

“ _Qui—_?”

“Aw, bless, you’re too young to know all those groups. They’re aces, though. I should make you a mixtape!” Perhaps Gillian exchanged mixtapes on a more casual basis in her youth, but in Caroline’s circle they were tantamount to a declaration of lust. Every time a boy made one for her, she felt it only a matter of time before they’d attempt waving a cock in the general vicinity of her body.

Caroline groans. “If she doesn’t know who Duran Duran is, she’s not going to know what a mixtape is,” she snips across the table.

Mock solemn, Lucia nods. “I’m afraid pooh bear is right, Gillian.”

They cackle.

“I’m _sorry,_ Caroline, but it is a _delightful_ nickname!” Lucia smiles apologetically and Caroline swears she is batting her eyelashes.

It is the best insincere apology she has ever received. Nonetheless she scowls, exhales furiously, and glances at the tiny cameo of imperial sourpuss Madame Cliquot on the metal cap of the champagne bottle, which proves a handy reminder for to call her mother.

“Are you drunk?” is, _bien sûr_ , the first thing out of Celia’s mouth.

“I’m not drunk.” She’s drunk. “Did you look at the photos I sent?”

“Yes, it looks wonderful—I think it’s _perfect._ ”

“There’s a problem. The only day available for the remainder of the year is Christmas.”

“You _must_ be drunk.”

“I’m _not_ drunk.” The truth is that despite the frustration of watching two lovely women flirt—there you go again, she chastises, thinking that daft sheep farmer is attractive—she is enjoying herself to a certain extent, and teeters on the edge of a delirious, detached stage of drunkenness where one looks upon the world as if from a euphoric cloud, a jovial Jupiter observing mere mortals at play. _What fools these mortals be!_ On the other hand, dwelling at length about what exactly Lucia and Gillian are talking about sets her blood back on a slow boil of low-key jealousy, impelling an urgency to wrap up the business at hand.

“Look,” she says to Celia. “You need to make a decision now so we can book it.”

“All right, then. Let’s do it!”

“Really?”

“Absolutely!”

At best, the stern spontaneity of her mother’s decisions is reminiscent of old war movies when one witnesses Hitler barking an order to his generals to invade Poland: Despite the unease—and, in this case, top-notch champagne—churning away in one’s system, one has to ask the pertinent questions. “So Christmas Day is okay with Alan?”

“Oh! Let me ask—hang on, he’s on the loo.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m drunk and I have to think of everything.”

“ _I knew it!_ Alan!”

Caroline can hear the pounding on the bathroom door. “Can’t you just call me back—?”

“Alan! D’ya want to get married on Christmas Day?”

“What about Prince Harry on Christmas Day?”

“Married, I said! DO YOU WANT TO GET MARRIED ON CHRISTMAS DAY?”

Precious time slips away: Immersed in earnest conversation, Lucia leans toward Gillian and rests a hand on the latter’s tanned forearm. She wonders how Gillian has maintained a tan so late in the season. The sober part of her brain supplies an answer: _She’s a farmer, you idiot, and outside all the live long fucking day._

After much incoherent shouting on the other end of the mobile, Celia finally confirms it: “Yes! He said yes!”

“Great—I’ll book it and take care of the down payment.”

“You’re perfect.”

“I’m not going to disagree with you this time.”

“No,” Celia chortles. “Because you’re drunk.”

“Hanging up on you now.” As Caroline limply holds the silent mobile in her hand, she watches Lucia rise from a chair and sashay in the general direction of the bar, entranced by the rhythmic roll of her ass and at the same time bereft that once again, the ball has gone sailing right over her bloody head.

Then, with the proprietorial clumsiness of a puppy, messy-haired Gillian flops down next to her on the divan. “She’s getting us another bottle!” Gillian hisses gleefully, as her fingers frantically type out a Morse code message of _free booze_ on Caroline’s knee.

“Oh no,” Caroline moans. If she gets any drunker, she will have no chance of sobering up later this evening. How will they get home? Even more urgently, how will she look even remotely attractive to a woman who is obviously a decade younger than she is?

Gillian, of course, is only thinking ahead to the next bottle. “Oh yes!”

Caroline’s mouth contorts violently, and all the words in her skull snarl into a traffic jam worthy of the M60. Take a breath, she tells herself, and sucks in a great big lungful. The words come out in a rush: “Okay, fine, great. But what I would really like to know is, just what the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

She doesn’t think she’s ever seen Gillian so visibly affronted, so completely offended, except perhaps the time when Caroline said that she thought the remake of _The Wicker Man_ was good. 

“I’m trying to be your wingman!” Gillian barks.

“Wingman?”

“Yes! I’m chatting her up, gathering intel, warming her up for you—well, not _literally,_ but—”

“Yeah, I know what a wingman is. What I don’t—” Drunkenly, Caroline lurches into condescending headteacher-speak: “ _What I fail to see_ is how telling this woman we’re _engaged_ and then aggressively flirting with her positively contributes to the cause of her finding me remotely interesting or attractive.”

“Christ, you are bombastic even when p-pissed.” Gillian shakes her head sadly. “You don’t get it.”

“Pray, explain the intricacies to me, extrapolate the data, show your work—” 

“I will, if you stop acting like a twat.”

“Very well. My twat filter is turned off.” When she realizes what she has just said, Caroline starts giggling.

Gillian joins in. “Is it like a permanent off switch? ’Cause that would be fucking grand.”

After they both indulge in extended tittering and twattering, Caroline pulls it together, clears her throat and, as only she can manage, demands politely: “All right. Go on. Tell me.”

Gillian raises a finger heavenward. “I have a plan.” She squints, looks momentarily confused, and above her head Caroline easily envisions a cartoon cloud containing a hamster spinning furiously in a wheel until the hamster loses footing and falls out of the wheel on its backside.

Caroline sighs. “Do you have a plan or a brain hemorrhage?”

“Okay, look. It takes time. I’m drawing her out, see. I got her talking. She were going on about her family—her mother is a right royal bitch too, so you’ve got that in common, first of all. And she’s got five sisters, so there was a very, very long list of sibling grievances to get through, so who knows, if you don’t get anywhere with her, you should try a sister.”

“Like I’m going to go all the way to Marseille for a shag.”

“She’s from Lyon,” Gillian retorts haughtily, “and only her sister Natasha is there now. Laila is in Paris, Manoush is in Boston—”

“Get to the point.”

“Anyway, once we’re past that I’ll tell her loads of grand stuff about you. Then, when the moment is right—”

“Hopefully before we get too drunker.”

“—when the moment is right, I will make the big reveal.” With a dramatic pause, Gillian places a hand over her heart. “I will confess to her that I cheated on you.”

Caroline’s mouth twists dangerously. “This is sounding a bit too much like real life for my liking.”

“Poetic license.”

“Is it poetic license if I hit you over the head with Madame Cliquot?”

“No, it’s assault and if you think I won’t press charges I will because it would be pretty hilarious to see your p-posh bitch arse handcuffed and in a police cruiser. Anyway, I tell her I cheated on you, because I was drunk and stupid—”

“So far that’s the truest bit of this scenario.”

“—and you, because you love me so, so bloody much, forgave me. Then I proposed—tearfully, of course—and you agreed to marry me.”

“Wow. I sound pretty stupid too.”

Gillian waves a hand in her face. “So anyway, you forgave me, but I know deep down it innit right, you’re still hurt, and I feel like shit for hurting you. And I want to make it right before we become wife and wife. You know, start off with a clean slate an’ all that. So.”

Once again Gillian raises a finger. Caroline wants to bite it. In a nice way. Before she grants weight and substance to this illicit thought with further analysis, she gives herself over to Gillian’s dramatic pause. 

“I tell her that I’m giving you a free pass—you get to spend one night with someone else before th’ wedding.” Then Gillian displays jazz hands in such a reckless manner that Caroline instinctively reaches for her purse in order to swat at this irresponsible miscreant. “And that’s when the magic happens.”

Caroline frowns. “I end up crying and throwing up in the toilet?”

“No.” Gillian stretches out an arm. “She looks across the room, her eyes meet yours, and the music rises in the background, maybe something classic-romantic, like ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’ or we could go classic-sleazy-nineties, like ‘I Touch Myself’—”

“Fuck, Gillian, my life is not a movie.”

“Aye, an’ we’re all the poorer for it, don’t ya think?”

“Look.” She seizes Gillian by a handful of cheap sweater, with the unintended but delightful consequence of distorting the v-neck of her dress and revealing a decent bit of cleavage and discovering that, holy Christ on a canapé, Gillian is wearing a black bra. Through sheer willpower she manages to pry her eyes away from that enticing spectacle and focus on those equally compelling albeit glassy eyes.

Because she views Gillian’s enlarged pupils as a darkened gateway to bad behavior, and because she needs to convince herself otherwise and not drunkenly trip over words, Caroline slowly enunciates the obvious: “This all sounds insane—no, it _is_ insane and it’s not going to work. And on top of that, what are we going to do when lovely Lucia finds out we’re actually booking this wedding for our parents and _not us_?”

When Caroline releases her, Gillian makes a grand show of straightening her dress and cardigan, while shooting Caroline a mockingly regal look of _how dare you, madame!_ Then she has the complete fucking nerve to volley back a calm, sensible counterpoint: “No one here’s going to give a toss as long as they’ve got their money and a booking, yeah? And Lucia gets her commission or whatever all the same.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Caroline rubs her brow. 

“I mean, it’s not like they’re giving us a special dyke discount—”

With a monumental, long-suffering sigh she snags Gillian by dress and sweater again, her chilliest head teacher glare latches onto Gillian like a judgmental tractor beam, and even in her drunken state she is acutely aware of how close their lips are. “I really wish you would not use that word.”

Blinking slowly, Gillian says, quite simply, “I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” Caroline releases her.

“Force of habit, you know. Just—I know, I know I shouldn’t say that.”

“Then why do you? I don’t get it. You’ve never been weird with me about it and, I mean, here you are, doing a very, ah, credible job of flirting with this woman, you’re clearly not, like, really homophobic.”

“Well, she’s fit,” Gillian says. “I mean, really fit, and if you weren’t around I’d definitely have a go—”

Caroline thinks she must be drunker than she realizes, because she cannot believe what she’s just heard. “What?”

“Nothing.” When upset Gillian’s accent thickens like porridge left in a pot, so the word comes out as _nuffin._

“No no no, not nothing, not nothing. Are you saying—”

Hoping to terminate the line of inquiry, Gillian nods briskly.

“Really? You’re attracted to women?”

On occasion Caroline has caught glimpses of a panicked, feral fierceness in Gillian, a wariness not unlike that of a cornered animal; in these moments, like a frenzied high note repeated again and again, her body vibrates with tension. Caroline has seen this trait in girls and women who have been abused—classmates from Oxford, colleagues at work, students and parents from school. Thus the dark undercurrent of Gillian’s relationship with her husband—the boozing, the brawling, the strange suicide—tugs at Caroline, as she finds herself in the tricky situation of wanting to ask, but suspecting that when it comes to navigating the shallows and depths of Gillian Greenwood, the patience of staying the course is perhaps the best strategy.

Putting aside the plethora of questions about Eddie, though, this is a far more intriguing development.

Gillian’s voice coils into a low growl: “You can’t say anything to anyone.”

“Of course not. I promise.” Gently Caroline lays a hand on Gillian’s bare knee, and is shocked at the heat rising from her skin. The gesture calms Gillian, who takes a deep breath—and sucks down the last bit of champagne in her glass.

“So,” Caroline begins. “If you don’t mind my asking—”

“Nosy.”

“Indulge me.”

Gillian’s shoulders spasm into a shrug. “Back in school, some fumblings here and there.”

Like bits of plastic trash floating upon the sea, Kate’s condemnation of their _embarrassed fumbles_ bobs back through Caroline’s mind.

“And after Eddie died, few years back, there were someone I were seeing on and off for a few months. She lived out Sowerby Bridge way.”

“Really? What happened?”

“Husband came back from tour of duty,” Gillian says sourly and stares into her empty glass. “Anyway. Male or female, I know how to f-fucking pick ’em.” She straightens attentively. “Heads up. She’s coming back.”

Smiling and carrying an unopened bottle of champagne, Lucia shimmers into view like a mirage. And God all mighty, Caroline thinks, I feel the thirst. 

“Look sexy and act like you love me,” Gillian says, “’cause I’m going to go into our origin story—” She leans in, presses a quick peck upon Caroline’s cheek, and rises to meet Lucia. 

All part of the ruse, of course. But as her cheek tingles and the champagne cork pops, all Caroline can do is squeak out: “‘Origin story’?” 


	4. the proper angle of a sunbeam

The thing is, Caroline thinks it’s working.

The tiny island in her brain that is sober tells her that she is mistaken, but that part will soon be underwater completely, submerged in a catastrophic cerebral climate change event brought on by copious amounts of champagne and wine.

Before launching into the Origin Story, Gillian makes a run to the loo. Not that Caroline is exactly keeping track—all right, she is keeping track—but this is first time since they’ve left the farm that Gillian has used the facilities, so _formidable bladder control_ can be added to Gillian’s innate skill set along with _fabulist storyteller, can burp the alphabet from A-L, and can balance a lamb on her shoulders hands-free while singing “Three little maids from school are we” in falsetto_ and Caroline feels very sad that Gillian was so thoroughly, heedlessly exposed to Gilbert and Sullivan at some point in her life that the musical contagion of an actual song implanted itself in her brain.

Additionally, Caroline admires how confidently Gillian strides across a room while drunk and wearing heels. She also admires the swish of her dress as it dances around her legs and her ass— _save yourself!_ screams Sober Brain as it goes under for what truly seems like the last time.

Then Lucia comes over and settles down on the divan next to her. Was this a well-calculated move on the part of her boozy wingman—a well-timed trip to the loo so that Lucia could sit next to her? Could this possibly indicate that lo, Gillian Greenwood has a plan? Actually thinks ahead? Let’s not get carried away, Caroline decides, as she precisely does just that by visually dive-bombing into the wedding planner’s ample cleavage.

Lucia gestures at the paper sprawl on the table: brochures, the cost estimate, and a receipt for the down payment and booking fees. “Do you have any more questions about the package?”

Yes, what size cup do you wear? Dear God, no more champagne. Caroline wrests her gaze away from Lucia’s chest. “Oh, no. No, no.” Rubbing her brow, she scoops the estimate and receipt into her purse. “We’re all settled, thank you.”

“I hope you do not feel as if we ignore you,” Lucia says, “Gillian and I. She is delightful to talk to, and she seems so fond of you, truly!”

“Well, I, ah, I should hope so, since we’re—”

“Oh, yes!” Lucia blurts. “Let me tell you something, Caroline.” She lays a hand on Caroline’s knee.

“Tell me something,” Caroline nearly moans, then beats her libido into submission, and tries to reframe the comment, only this time she burbles it out as a weirdly echoed query: “Tell me something?”

“Yes. I have been doing this job for a long time, well, not here, but other places too. So I see—I know, when a couple is good or bad. You know? When they work or don’t work. I have—what do you say? A sheep sense?”

“Sixth sense?”

“Ah, yes.” Lucia snaps her fingers. Pavlov’s head teacher jumps. “That is what I meant. Yes, I have this, ah, sensitivity, you see.”

Like a bowl of Jello shaken by a bored child, Caroline’s head bobs frantically.

“And I am rarely wrong. You two—” Gently she claps Caroline’s shoulders with both hands and Caroline would think she’s going in for a kiss, save for the bothersome detail that they are discussing her fictional soon-to-be-wife. “You _have_ something.”

Caroline sputters, giggles, and breaks out into raucous laughter. She is nearly face down in Lucia’s lap when Sober Brain issues out a stern warning: _steady on, lass._

But the giggles are so infectious that the fairly tipsy Lucia joins in with Caroline. “My God, why do you laugh so?”

“Oh, just—you know—” Wiping away tears of laugher. “They said we would never last.” She breaks into laughter again, this time envisioning taking the piss with her mother: _Gillian and I are getting married!_ Christ, Caroline thinks, Celia would be apoplectic at the mere thought of her _pretending_ to marry Gillian. A mental note—a message in a bottle drifting along the drunken sea of her mind—is issued to remind Gillian that they must never tell Celia precisely how they secured the booking for this wedding.

She swipes at her damp face with a napkin and hears Gillian before actually laying eyes on her fraudulent paramour: “Sweet Jesus, Lucia! I leave you alone with my wife-to-be and you have her laughing so hard I could hear her in the ol’ WC.”

“I’m—just—so—fucking—happy,” Caroline says, and starts laughing again.

Champagne flows into everyone’s glasses from Lucia’s generous pour. Swiping her glass from the table, Gillian drops herself in the chair across from them. “Sounds like a case of nerves. What d’ya think, Lucia?”

“Ah. Everybody acts a little different in the face of such a life-changing event, is it not true?” As Caroline attempts to pull herself together again, Lucia pats her knee and somehow she manages not to fall off the divan to prostrate herself on the floor in offering to this divine creature.

“Gillian,” Lucia says, drawling the name in such sensual fashion— _Gill-lee-ann_ —that it effortlessly enhances Gillian’s attractiveness even more, “you were going to tell me how you two met.”

“Oh, yeah!” This enthusiastically growled phrase sounds disturbingly like Austin Powers and leads Caroline to fear that Gillian will start randomly punctuating her conversation with _yeah, baby!_ Straightening, she clears her throat loudly, an audio signal that she hopes her insane stepsister will correctly interpret _as do not oversell and calm the fuck down._ But it is far too late, because Gillian has already had too much time—ten minutes in the loo—to fashion together a grand continental lesbian romance.

“So,” Gillian begins. She sits up, runs a hand over her lap in an effort to still her restless, swinging legs.

In anticipation, Lucia leans forward.

“I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar.”

Caroline claps a hand over her eyes. Of course, Gillian will manufacture a romantic backstory woven from a stockpile of lines from random 1980s songs.

“Where?” Like an earnest television hostess, Lucia crosses her legs and leans forward even more intently, an action that gives her cleavage a nice bit of pop. Then she smiles warmly at Caroline, and hope is renewed. Perhaps Gillian’s hamster-wheel-powered plan will succeed.

“Val-d'Isère,” Gillian replies smoothly and Caroline nearly spits out her champagne.

Of course, Lucia is terribly pleased that they met in France and beams at Caroline again. “Really?”

“Yeah. I’d been, um, hitchhiking across the continent, and just as I was about to hit Italy I ran out of money right there and then. So I got a job waiting tables at a hotel bar—and it just happened to be the hotel where Caroline was staying on holiday. She was on term break from jolly old Oxford.”

“Oxford!” Awestruck, Lucia gives the snotty bitch a worshipful look. “So impressive!”

_Bless you, chemistry degree that is now entirely useless to me._

Lucia picks up the thread of the story: “So she came into your place of work and _voila_ —love at first sight!”

“No, actually at first I thought she was a snotty bitch. She stiffed me on a tip for a Bacardi and Coke—”

 _I would never stiff anyone on a tip, nor order something as common as Bacardi and Coke,_ Caroline mouths indignantly at Gillian—but neither she nor Lucia are paying attention.

“But one afternoon, on m’day off, I’m sitting in a café, writing down my, ah, impressions of France in my travel journal, and who walks by but Caroline. She invites herself to have coffee with me and Lucia, I tell you, we sat there and talked for hours about, about our lives, our families, our, our, menstrual cycles—”

Caroline pinches her brow. Lucia must be tipsier than she thinks, or too caught up in the whimsical momentum of this fabulous story to focus on details—or maybe she is really convinced that the mating rituals of English lesbians are as bizarre as the country’s cuisine.

“It was amazing, I felt so connected to her so, so quickly. After she left me that day, I noticed there was a stain on my notebook, where her coffee cup was. And ash in the pages—” Gillian pauses dramatically. “Now I’ve got myself lost.”

Lucia appears terribly moved by this soap opera performance, but the referencing of another song makes Caroline bite the inside of her mouth and shake her head at her pseudo-lover.

“Then the very next day, I was back at work and I kept seeing her. Day afer day, for like, almost a week. Watching, I kept waiting—still anticipating love, never hesitating to become a fated one. And, then, turning and returning to some secret place inside—”

_Oh for fuck’s sake not that one, I will have the earworm for days!_

“Because I knew deep down inside she really meant something special to me, and then later that day, when I saw her slalom down La Face for the first time, she took my breath away. I knew, then and there, I knew someday I would make this amazing woman mine.”

Lucia’s cooed, elongated _oh_ of approval is a noise akin to one evoked in a cat lady confronted with a YouTube playlist of kittens. Her large, faun-like eyes settle dotingly upon Caroline, who now unwillingly recalls a skiing trip with John shortly after they married where her first trip on the slopes resulted in a sprained ankle and losing her favorite winter cap. The rest of the vacation involved a lot of spiked hot chocolate, a furious argument about John’s flirtation with a Swedish Olympic hopeful, and make-up sex that, nine months later, brought Lawrence into the world, and now she has the epiphany that her second son’s origin in drunken rage sex sure explains a lot. Another mental note in a bottle and she focuses back on the origin story at hand.

“So,” Gillian continues, “we had a mad affair for the remainder of her break, then—” She pauses, looking subtly anguished as she did the time that Celia dumped a bottle of Jagermeister down the sink because the old woman had thought “it went bad.” “—she left and went back to Oxford.”

In the aftermath of this anticlimactic story, Lucia gives Caroline a wounded look. _I would never do that to you, Lucia!_ Caroline communicates telepathically.

“Then I heard she married some knobhead, and I got married m’self. We both had kids, got rid of our respective husbands eventually, and before you know it, like, 25 years have flown by. Then a few months ago I tracked her down on Facebook.”

Jesus Christ. Now Gillian is recreating their parents’ whirlwind reunion and marriage.

“Facebook is good for something, no?” observes Lucia.

“It is! So we started messaging each other. Then we arranged a time to meet for tea. When she walked into the teashop, the light through the window hit her just so—” Gillian pauses dramatically, raises a hand as if demonstrating the proper angle of a sunbeam required for rekindling a great love. “—and it was like all those years hadn’t passed at all. I still felt the same way about her as I always did.”

“ _Magnifique_!” Lucia raises her glass for a toast.

Delicate stemware is haphazardly clinked. “Cheers!” Gillian bellows.

“Mazeltov,” Caroline adds, even though she has no idea what this really means. As they all savor a moment of silence for a tale well told, she notices that the second bottle of champagne is almost kaput.

“Darling,” Gillian says.

Caroline realizes the endearment is aimed squarely at her big blonde head. “Yes, puppy breath?”

She has never been good with pet names.

“I was thinking—it’s getting late, we’re both a little tipsy—perhaps we should get a room here for the night? If we could, that is.”

Lucia snaps her fingers again. Head tilted, Caroline straightens attentively like a Corgi awaiting a treat. Gillian smirks.

“We may have some rooms still available,” Lucia says. “There were two cancellations earlier today.”

Gillian’s voice goes up into a breathlessly feminine, doting spouse register. “Why don’t you go check, muffin top?”

She gives Caroline a lingering look—this must be the moment when she’s going to lay it on thick and make the so-called big reveal. Would the room potentially be for a romantic rendezvous? If so, would Gillian sleep passed out in the Jeep Cherokee? So many details, so many ways to get it wrong, so many ways to get it right—she cannot think, she can only play her part.

Still, as with her impulsive mother, confirmation is required. “Are you _certain,_ lava lump?”

“Absolutely, cherry crumble.”

“Very well.” With what Caroline hopes is a slow but stately, elegant motion, she rises, reminds herself that she is wearing heels, and picks up her purse. “I live to make you happy, monkey glands.”

Before she can shakily set forth toward the reservation desk, Gillian stands up and blocks her.

“No,” Gillian replies solemnly. “I live to make _you_ happy.”

Now Caroline is utterly fucking confused, because Gillian stares at her with such unnerving intensity, such a convincing counterfeit of love, that what happens next seems almost natural: Gillian clasps the back of her neck and lays on her a kiss of such epic proportions that she drops her purse, she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, and she thinks of the sunbeams angling their way through the window this afternoon, and that wonderful feeling of ease, of freedom, that she has not experienced in quite some time.

As she swoons precariously on heels, Gillian kneels and retrieves the purse from the floor. “Remember,” she says, loudly enough for Lucia to hear, “I’m doing this for you.”

Caroline takes the purse. “Right,” she mutters breathlessly. “Thank you.”

With a crookedly mysterious, Halifaxian kind of Mona Lisa smile, Gillian squeezes her arm and claims the spot on the divan next to Lucia, while Caroline dizzily sets forth on the next phase of this potentially disastrous or possibly amazing adventure. All she knows right now is that if she doesn’t get laid tonight, she will interpret it as a message she is not fit for human consumption and will finally, officially commit to a long-term relationship with a vibrator and whatever soft-core lesbian porn she can find online for free. Because she sure as hell isn’t paying for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Songs of the Origin Story: 
> 
> [“Don’t You Want Me,” The Human League](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPudE8nDog0)
> 
> [“Black Coffee in Bed,” Squeeze](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVj1W-bhhbs)
> 
> [“Take My Breath Away,” Berlin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx51eegLTY8)  
> (The _Top Gun_ film clips in the video try very hard to convince you that Goose and Maverick are not fucking and did not have a threesome with Val Kilmer, but don’t you believe it for a second...also the rest of it, including Terri Nunn’s hair, is peak 80s).


	5. you wide-eyed girls, you get it right

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. The combination of COVID-19 stress and reading a very big stream-of-consciousness book that is basically one long sentence had a baby and it was this chapter. Anyway, sorry, think of it as an interlude, a foray into a drunken woman's brain, and hopefully the next chapter will be more normal (or as normal as, you know, I get). 
> 
> Chapter Soundtrack: ["Space Song," Beach House](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBtlPT23PTM)

Something happens on the way to the front desk, or maybe it’s on the way from the front desk, it is a drunken time loop where Caroline is uncertain if she actually booked a room for the night or if she imagines that she did and so she stops dead in the lobby and looks at the Mastercard in her wallet as if this face of the capitalist god can offer divination but it doesn’t—and then she’s sitting at the bar, not the large lounge area where she left Lucia and Gillian but up toward the front of the space, a standard bar with stools and she’s eating fish and chips, and she is talking to some bloke named Randy, who is American and from Louisville and she forgets where Louisville is, which state it’s in, but Randy seems nice and is not hitting on her, he is married, he says, he is a Methodist minister, he and his wife, who is originally from Skipton, are on an extended walking tour of the United Kingdom, and outside it is twilight, beautiful, bewitching, the violet hour— _who said that?_ —Randy mentions too casually that his wife is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and Caroline says she is sorry, and impulsively she touches his hand and then thinks she shouldn’t have done that because she’s been plucking at greasy chips with her bare hand but he squeezes her hand and smiles painfully, it is awful what happens to the mind, to lose so much of what you are, she cannot bear to imagine that because currently she experiences an overabundance of consciousness and she wants to confide _I’m in a time loop, Randy,_ but doesn’t because it would sound completely batshit—who said that recently? Lawrence, of course, _you are batshit_ —but she wants to share something with him, she wants to be kind, she knows she is capable of kindness sometimes maybe, it is not really the violet hour but a lavender hour because the sky isn’t that dark yet, and he talks about God and how his faith gets him through and she thinks _oh shit_ because religion makes her uncomfortable and she is a scientist at heart and ok a coward and an agnostic too, believing in God takes a lot of ovaries and she remembers out of the blue—out of the lavender?—that Gillian sent her a text how many minutes ago?—she risks offending Randy by looking at her phone and yes, a text that says _working on it don’t come back just yet I’ll find you_ and that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence but at this point she doesn’t really care, and Randy says _I know you may not be a believer but that’s okay, I know some folks aren’t, please don’t think I’m offended,_ and Caroline says, _oh good,_ she offers him some chips and he takes them, and outside lavender hour deepens into the spectrum, and how this happens without conscious awareness even if you are staring intently at the sky, this synchronization of nerves with consciousness, she read some article about it recently, suggesting that the mind actually antedates consciousness so that it syncs up with stimulus, we are actually living a half-second in the past, the neuroscientist said, and if Caroline could ask God a question if would be _what’s up with that?_ because without conscious awareness the lavender deepens into something else, and as Randy talks about the Cairngorms in Scotland she is pulled into the hypnotic, ambient riff of the song playing in the bar, it’s like the entire atmosphere shifted from casual adult contemporary pop to—this, an androgynous voice demanding _What makes this fragile world go round? Were you ever lost? Was she ever found?_ Jesus Christ, it’s the new bartender, there was a shift change, how old is this kid anyway, he looks as young as her sons, and here is Gillian suddenly standing next to her, out of the lavender, out of the blue, her eyes uncommon blue—is there a word for them?— maybe it was in John’s shit novel but no poet he so probably not, she thinks she would undertake a pilgrimage to find out, walk the Cairngorms or somewhere similarly lyrical on the lookout for a poet-prophet, a hermit on the mountain who might tell her what color Gillian Greenwood’s eyes are, _I mean who fucking cares about the meaning of life, there is this woman in Yorkshire with eyes that I must figure out,_ she imagines Scotland to be filled with cranky craggy poets, _fall—back—into—place,_ the song intones, there is a bit of green in Gillian’s eyes too, wildwood, wormwood, Greenwood, and Gillian presses a hand in the small of her back and asks _did you get a room?_ and Caroline says _yes,_ and Gillian responds, _she wants to talk with you first, she’s not certain, but_ —and Caroline cannot believe it, is stunned to think that Lucia is actually bloody considering it, how drunk must that beautiful girl be, she really had started to think that she and Gillian would pass out together in the room and wake up hung over and over a big breakfast have a laugh about the whole thing and that would be that, done and dusted, and she is leaning into Gillian, and she is distinctly aware of (1) Gillian’s absent-minded caress, nimble fingers at play in the small of her back, (2) the close proximity of Gillian’s lips to her own, (3) an amazing, compelling urgency to kiss her, the state of precognition awaiting the sign, yes or no, here it is, the marriage of stimulus and consciousness, (4) the song seems to endorse the former: _you wide-eyed girls, you get it right,_ (5) and God bless sweet Randy, who says, _is this your girlfriend, Caroline?_ oh shit, she must have come out to him at some point, oh that’s right, he said his son is gay and was the first male majorette at his high school, and the lavender, the lavender deepens into something else.


	6. the lesbian robert redford

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slightly sleep-deprived, praying the typos are not too horrible, fingers crossed.

An eight-foot ice sculpture of a unicorn precariously wheeled through the lobby of a modest hotel possesses the great potential to unsettle the most serious and sober of minds; thus, it stands to reason that the sculpture’s influence upon an altered state of consciousness would prove even more alarming.

The innate surrealism of the moment functions as the smelling salts that finally bring Caroline tumbling inside out of the time loop and crashing into the mundane reality of standing in the lobby of the hotel with Randy and Gillian. _How did I get here? This is not my beautiful car, this is not my beautiful wife._

Briefly her mind sings along with the Talking Heads, letting the days go by, into the blue again, as they all gawk at the sublime horror of the unicorn ice sculpture as it rolls on toward its outdoor destination—hopefully, Caroline thinks, where it will embrace its rightful demise under the full force of a flame thrower. 

“Bloody hell,” Gillian mumbles.

Randy nods. “Quite the spectacle.”

“You know, _darling,_ this gives me an idea—” Gillian begins.

Slowly sobering up, Caroline realizes why this endearment irritates so: John always calls her _darling—_ well, past tense, called her that. Now it would probably be _oh my darling mad lesbian heifer._ Which explains why every time Gillian has called her this, she wants to toss wine in that beautiful hot sexy trailer trash face but alas, she is beverage-free at the moment and _I really need to sort out this whole Gillian thing._ She also needs to sort out the Lucia thing. Fuck. Where _is_ Lucia? How _did_ they end up in the lobby? Rubbing her brow, she can only think desperately of the one thing that is life’s great clarifier: coffee.

“—I think when we have our big ceremony, we should have an ice sculpture of a Swaledale ewe,” Gillian is saying.

“Folks around here sure do love their sheep.” Randy’s languid drawl makes Caroline sleepy. 

Gillian takes a deep breath. “Randy,” she intones, “sheep are to Yorkshire what General Motors are to Dubuque.”

Randy chuckles. “Think you mean Dee-troit, Gillian.”

“I need coffee,” Caroline blurts.

Gillian scowls. “Then what’s in Dubuque?”

“I think there’s a ham museum—”

“Coffee,” Caroline repeats.

Randy grins. “Gillian, I think you best get your lady some coffee. As for me, I’ve got dinner plans, so I will leave you two to your evening.”

As a firm and steady rule, Caroline is not a hugger except in certain extreme cases—like when you think your mother is dead in a ditch somewhere and you’ve blubbered out all your romantic and vague life problems to a befuddled but kind sheep farmer, and the sheep farmer smells faintly like hay and who knew that this fragrance, gently nestled in the nape of the neck, could be so sweet an intoxicant—but burly, bearded Randy kindly scoops her up in a lovely hug and whispers _congratulations_ in her ear before she departs.

As Caroline reels off back toward the bar, Gillian remains enmeshed in a long goodbye with Randy—hugs and laughter and jokes about sheep and ham and Dubuque. She finds herself envying Gillian’s ease in talking with people, just as she also finds herself greatly disturbed that she still vividly recalls the warmth and scent of that hug that seems nearly a lifetime ago.

Back at the bar Caroline asks for a coffee. She is blowing ripples across the hot black expanse of the cup when Gillian finally totters over.

Clambering atop a stool, Gillian slaps the bar with her hand, which alarms the boyish young bartender. “Jagerbomb,” she commands.

Caroline fixes him with a death glare. “You will _not_ give her a Jagerbomb.”

“I said,” Gillian growls between clenched teeth, “Jagerbomb.”

“Don’t do it.”

“Jagerbomb.”

“No.”

As if witnessing a ping-pong match in hell between Hitler and Stalin, the bartender’s gaze bounds apprehensively between them. A degree in hospitality and tourism from Bedfordshire left him sorely deficient in matters such as negotiating drunk disputes between bickering middle-aged lesbian couples. 

“Who f-fucking died and left you boss, eh?” snarls Gillian at her fraudulent paramour.

“I need you to keep your head for a while longer, all right?”

“Fine.” Defeated but defiant, Gillian grunts at the Man Child in the Plonker Land: “Whatever shit white wine you’ve got open, then.” 

Caroline relents and says nothing further; who is she to come between a woman and her booze? At least the wine will erode fewer brain cells than a single blast of that Teutonic turpentine. Besides, they are wasting precious time. Time loop. Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future—and into the past. “Where is Lucia? You said she wanted to talk to me.”

Abruptly Gillian seizes her wrist. Frowning, she stares at Caroline’s hand with unswerving intensity and Caroline panics, thinking this a prelude to either vomit or a declaration of love and honestly, she does not know in these circumstances which one could possibly be worse.

“What?” she breathes out.

Puzzled, Gillian looks up. “Thought you were wearing a watch.”

The joint force of their sputtering giggling powers up into ribald howls of laughter. Gillian nearly falls off the stool, Caroline bumps her cup of coffee and sends black gold molting over its rim, and the bartender morosely wonders if he should have become a copper like his mum wanted all along. Dutifully, he sits a glass of pinot grigio in front of Gillian.

After nearly five minutes of cackling, they settle down. Gillian gulps down half the glass. “Okay. So. Lucia is dealing with other clients—think they might be the same wankpots responsible for that b-bloody nightmare of an ice sculpture. Said she’ll be done in like—an hour? Half hour?” Gillian waves a hand dismissively. “Anyway, like you said earlier, ‘time is a meaningless construct.’”

“When did I say _that_?” 

“Ah! See?” Gillian bellows triumphantly.

It is unnerving, Caroline thinks, to be a hostage to time, to be this fucking aware of it. Not to mention her own frustrating limitations. The mirrored wall of the bar offers the most basic self-reflection, but the only bit of herself on view above the glittering scaffold of whiskeys and vodkas and gins and cordials is blonde hair and a furrowed brow. “You know, I don’t know—I don’t know if anything is going to happen with her. I’m just not—not good at being casual about this.”

A weary kind of wincing is artfully inlaid into Gillian’s self-deprecating grins, the most subtle marring of the expression; like kintsugi, this gilded fissure only enhances a unique, broken beauty. “You mean you’re not a big old slapper. Like me.”

“No,” Caroline retorts with unexpected vehemence. “That’s not—I’m not judging you at all, I’m not, this, this isn’t about you. It’s about me. I’m different and I’ve never been—” She stops, wavering before the confessional plunge: “—I’ve never been _good_ at sex.”

Gillian appears stunned by admission; either that or the house white is truly atrocious. She mulls it over, spinning the wine in the glass. She shakes her head. “No. I can’t believe that. It’s that, that bloody man, that f-fucking pillock of a husband of yours, he’s got you believing bollocks.”

“Come on. Why d’ya think he cheated on me? I wasn’t fulfilling him.”

“Fulfilling him? What about f-fulfilling you, eh? I mean, seriously—” Gillian pauses and cautiously feels out the moment, attempting to gauge if any lingering bit of loyalty to John remains present in his ex-wife. Then, bluntly: “He really isn’t all that. Y’know what I mean?”

She has no idea if Gillian is being genuinely kind or completely honest, but, laughing, she downs the last of the coffee. “My dearest fake wife-to-be, are you telling me my ex-husband is a disappointment in the bedroom?”

“Christ, Caroline. No offense, I recall m’ last dental cleaning with more fondness. Least I got some free floss out of that venture.”

She would laugh again, save for thought of: “Kate too. I bungled it with Kate.” Which makes her want to cry and order the stiffest shot of whiskey. 

“Well, it were new with Kate, yeah? Takes a while sometimes, to find good rhythm with someone new. Not all fireworks the first time around.” Nervously Gillian rubs the stem of the wineglass. “I mean, it’s, it’d been a long time since you’d been with a woman, wasn’t it?”

Caroline sighs heavily. “Yeah.”

“Yeah. So. Think, think you can give yourself a break on that.”

Maybe _she_ should have given me a break on that, Caroline thinks sourly. But then Kate gave her a break on a lot of things outside the bedroom. So there was that. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. But, I mean, at any rate, booking a room is a waste because I’m not going to use it, I doubt I’ll do anything with her—might be lucky if she consents to snog me.”

Gillian finishes her wine. “Room’s not for you, it’s for me.”

Caroline stares at her.

“Yeah. That’s the plan, batman. I pass out in room, you two go get your jollies at hers, and you come back in th’ morning to fetch me. We can have breakfast together, and you can give me all the dirty details.” Excitedly, Gillian executes a 360-degree spin on the stool before stopping and leaning in toward Caroline, who is not about to object to either another cleavage reveal or Gillian’s warm hand on her thigh. “Did you know they have a breakfast buffet? Bloke at the concierge desk were telling me it’s huge, there’s like six kinds of omelets!”

“So you made me pay for an overpriced hotel room so you can eat six omelets?” She would not be surprised if Gillian could eat six omelets in one sitting; during a recent family dinner Gillian ate about three servings of everything, including brussels sprouts. A farmer’s metabolism is truly a wonder to behold.

“You’re going to spend a night with a beautiful French-Moroccan woman,” Gillian retorts solemnly, “so I think that’s a, a pretty fair exchange.”

“Were you listening to _anything_ I’ve just said to you? It won’t happen. I can’t do it. I’m going to fuck it up somehow. She’ll run off screaming.”

“I refuse to Justin Belieber that.”

“Is that legitimate Cockney rhyming slang or are you making shit up again?”

Gillian dismisses this with a head shake and a sigh. “Hate to think of all this being all for nowt. Been one of my finest performances, it has.”

“What?” As it sinks in, Caroline blinks at the empty coffee cup. “Oh, Christ. _You’ve done this before._ I’m afraid to even ask.”

“Well, since you asked—"

“I didn’t.”

“—one time, to have it off with this bloke—”

Caroline groans.

“—I pretended I were a wildlife photographer and that I rescued a baby dingo from a wildfire.”

“You didn’t.”

Nodding, Gillian hums.

“And did he—?”

More humming, more nodding.

“Was it—?”

Humming, nodding, smiling.

“Bloody hell.” Caroline says it with soft admiration.

“Well,” Gillian admits, “he did steal my wallet after. Joke were on him, though. Only two quid in it, plus my library card and baby photos of Raff and Monica Vitti—she’s my best ewe. Anyway, que sera sera, I should shove off, your prom date should be here any moment.” She slides off the stool, nearly turning an ankle as she lands, and sways woozily.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, just—d’ya mind, just walking me up to room?”

“Yeah. Of course.” Caroline digs through her purse, tosses twenty quid on the bar, assumes it’s enough. The baby bartender looks pleased enough, but that could just be the fact that he’s happy to be rid of them.

Heading toward the stairs, Gillian cuts a precarious swath through the lobby, weaving as she does on heels. “I’ll warn you now,” she mumbles, “might order room service later, I’ll probably get peckish.”

Imagining a laundry list of items from bottles of Jagermeister to endless bags of crisps piling up on the bill, Caroline rolls her eyes. “Just don’t order steak.”

“Of course, now I fucking want steak. Because you know what?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m— _hun-gry like the woooolf_!”

The toneless bellow draws furtive, apprehensive looks from various suited individuals near the front desk.

“No,” Caroline murmurs, “don’t sing—”

“‘Mouse is alive, running with Tide, and I’m _hun-gry like the wolf_!’”

“Fuck sakes, that’s not even right.”

“Doot doot doot doot doot doot doot—”

“And now you have to sing _the most annoying part._ ”

The second they are in the room Gillian flings herself face down on the queen-sized bed; her dress crests well above both knees and the fabric sloppily binds the legs like sinews of seaweed around a magnificent wreck, and Caroline winces guiltily at comparing her as such. Still, she permits herself the unabashed, unobserved pleasure of gazing upon those lovely, muscled thighs.

As a minute passes, Gillian remains disturbingly quiet and still upon the bed.

Spooked by the silence, Caroline takes a wobbly, high-heeled step toward the bed. This would be a hell of a thing: She, a distinguished and respected head teacher, discovered dead drunk in a hotel room with a dead drunk. Another step, and the fear rises because it doesn’t even look like Gillian is breathing. Another step, shakier than the last, and she leans over, hand trembling as it brushes against Gillian’s shoulder. _What if she’s really—_

Then Gillian releases a rip-roaring snore. Stumbling backward—and turning her ankle in the process—Caroline squeaks in terror, then gasps in relief. With a hand fluttering upon her chest, she spends a long minute waiting for her racing heart to match the slow, steady rise and fall of Gillian’s back. Right, sorted: Stepsister not dead.

Downstairs she prowls the lounge area and finds Lucia not far from where they all sat earlier in the day: at a small candlelit table near a night-filled window. She appears to be halfway through a carafe of wine, and Caroline wonders if she’s faltered even a bit in steady alcohol consumption throughout the day but that’s the French for you, she thinks, wine and cheese only make them stronger. 

Lucia is cool, composed, leonine. Legs crossed, cleavage popping. Even as she smiles, gesturing for Caroline to sit down, something of her earlier, innate warmth has dissolved.

But then, Caroline reminds herself as she eases into a chair, this is neither love nor any kind of grand romance, but a negotiation.

Lucia opens up with the obvious: “So. You have come.”

The remainder of the carafe is poured into an empty wineglass meant for Caroline. “I know this must be very weird for you,” she says.

Lucia shrugs. “Actually, it is not uncommon. But it’s usually men, you know? You would be surprised to know how often I am propositioned by men about to marry. You have no idea! They think it is their—right, I guess you could say? One last bit of fun before the marriage. They act as if they are about to go off to the wars, as if they are about to die _._ ” She snorts. “If marriage is the tomb to them, why even do it, you know?”

 _Till death do us part._ “Good question,” Caroline says softly. 

“And you?” Lucia prompts.

“What?”

“Why do you do this? Is it a simple lust, attraction? Or a revenge, this silly idea to ‘make things even,’ like Gillian says to me.”

“It was her idea and I—just went along with it,” Caroline stammers. Of course, this makes her sound weak, foolish, easily lead.

“I see.” Lucia finishes her wine. “Gillian says it is like a movie.”

Caroline snorts with laughter. “Of course.”

“ _Indecent Proposal,_ it’s called, in English. You are familiar with it?”

“Sort of. Robert Redford is a millionaire and he pays Whatshisface a million dollars to sleep with Whathisface’s wife, Demitasse.”

“I saw it on the TV, a very long time ago.” Lucia smiles, adding wryly, “Gillian says you are the lesbian Robert Redford.”

“Except I’m not a millionaire and I’m not paying you and you’re not married to Gillian, so yes, it scans perfectly, doesn’t it?” 

Lucia laughs. “She also warned me that you are quite _sarcastique._ ”

“French makes my character defects sound ever so palatable. But look, Lucia, I _do_ like you. And I know, yeah, it’s weird, and it’s wrong, and it is really an indecent proposal. I’ve got to admit that much is true. But it’s—” Caroline is about to say _it’s not really true, any of it, and can we please have a reset,_ when Lucia places a warm hand over hers and she sucks in a breath with a squeak.

“You are not my usual type, you know.”

Her heart sinks. “You like men.”

“Yes, sometimes I do. But that is not what I meant. I am fond of a specific type.” She raises both brows as encouragement for Caroline to put two and two together.

Confirmation that Lucia is a possessor of a particular kind of exquisite, continental patience comes twined with the revelation that Lucia’s type of woman is currently passed out drunk in a room that Caroline has paid for.

It all makes sense now. Why wouldn’t it? Gillian is an attractive woman, and two of them got on like a house on fire. Still, the bad taste of once again falling short of someone’s ineffable standards and unknowable desires lingers bitterly in her mouth. “Really?”

“ _Oui._ ” Lucia smiles wryly. “I thought, she is flirting with me for fun, and I enjoyed it, because I find her very attractive.” She raises a hand. “I assure you, I had no, ah, intention of doing anything. But imagine my surprise when I find out she is flirting with me for _you._ ”

An odd, disorienting mix of devastation and relief—a minor, passing grief, like realizing a celebrity crush you had as a teenager has died—gathers in Caroline’s gut as she slumps in the chair.

To her credit, Lucia looks concerned. “Are you offended?”

“No.” Caroline manages a reply, and a terse addendum. “Disappointed, perhaps.”

“Don’t be.” Lucia still caresses her hand. “I think you are very lovely.”

Knowing a perfunctory compliment when she hears it, she rallies a polite smile. The rules of the game go on, no matter the players or the consequences, so she begins to anticipate the simple joy of sleeping it off in an expensive hotel room and having a huge hangover breakfast in the morning. Who knows, maybe she’ll eat six omelets too.

Lucia, however, operates under no such oppressive rules and effortlessly enacts moves in a game far more sophisticated than the likes of Caroline are acquainted with. She has not relinquished her hold on Caroline’s hand and, in fact, runs her thumb in a languorous course over the smooth mountain ridge of Caroline’s knuckles. “And, ah, there is a way for—all of us to be happy.”

Momentarily distracted by thoughts of future omelets and crying in a Bloody Mary tomorrow morning, Caroline blinks as her stubborn brain refuses to register what exactly Lucia suggests.

In fact, it takes Lucia leaning across the table—with Caroline worrying that those perfect breasts sway too close to the low tealight on the table, a boob flambé is not the way anyone would want to end the evening—and kissing her soundly, softly, sweetly on the mouth before the nature of the proposition blossoms forth in all its practical, lusty intent. “Oh.”

“Now you see what I am saying?”

“ _Oui,_ ” Caroline confirms breathlessly, as if having the tongue of a Frenchwoman in her mouth has immediately rendered her fluent in the language.

“Ah,” Lucia teases, amused. “At last you speak my language!” 

Caroline clears her throat. “Did you—discuss this at all with Gillian?”

“No.” This admitted with a sigh. “She was so focused on you, she wanted you to have a night to remember, that I did not think she would, you know, be open to the possibility.”

Oh, the irony. Caroline cannot help but bark out a laugh. Probably if she had relented and allowed Gillian to indulge in a Jagerbomb or two, God knows what kind of sexual permutations and pairings in Gillian’s past would have come to light.

“Why do you laugh?”

“She’s more open-minded than you think—well, probably more so than me, at least.”

The broad, eager sweep of Lucia’s grin checkmates her. “Then perhaps we should ask her?” 

With one fell swoop shit gets increasingly real, and Caroline’s semi-pickled mind races desperately in search of an advantage. She leans forward intently, poising herself for arguments and rebuttals that bring to mind the good old days of intellectual one-upmanship at Oxford Union—and once again Lucia unravels her with the sensual overload of another full-mouthed, passionate snog.

She may not be exactly Lucia’s type, but damned if the woman is not doing a credible job of convincing her otherwise, because it initiates a round of kissing that leads ever closer to the precipice of a very interesting quandary.

“Well?” Lucia prompts after the fourth or fifth kiss—and well-primed for whatever follows.

“I don’t know, Lucia.”

“Why?” 

“Because if I really want to disappoint two people at once, I’d simply have dinner with my children.”


	7. that’s when you fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shit got real.

> _Mr. Neville:_ I'm surprised, delighted. I am overwhelmed.
> 
> _Mrs. Herbert:_ Mr. Neville, I will take all three states of your satisfaction into consideration.
> 
> —Peter Greenaway, _The Draughtsman’s Contract_

**_i. the heretic heart_ **

There is a two-phase exit strategy in place—two phases because Caroline is Caroline and at this juncture in her life, she would barely break a sweat being prime minister during a zombie apocalypse because it would no doubt be easier than managing a school filled with overprivileged hormonal spotted adolescents. The plan relies on a timeworn strategy utilized by oppressed women the world over that is nonetheless quite foreign to her: playing the hapless female thwarted by technological-based mechanisms—in this instance, the key card to the room. It only requires a minor act of illegal sabotage first.

Before they headed up to a hotel room that contained a slumbering shepherdess, Lucia had been called to the front desk to finalize details concerning her naff ice sculpture clients. As she sat alone at the table, Caroline seized the moment and attempted to inflict some genteel but effective damage on the key card by frantically hammering a tube of lipstick against the metal strip on the card, much to the consternation and quiet alarm of not only several patrons in the vicinity, but also the waiter who had stopped by with the check. The waiter, of course, had been warned by the bartender to “tread carefully with the mad posh dyke” and so executed a frantic, military style turn and retreat—while wondering helplessly if he somehow got the definition of “lipstick lesbian” wrong—before Caroline could even open her mouth to unfurl the lie that she was practicing an a cappella version of “Kokomo,” although it did not stop her from tunelessly warbling, “we’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow” to a small, baffled audience of diners and drinkers, none of whom were intoxicated enough to truly appreciate her performance.

Now, on the precipice of the hotel room, and after several limp-wristed girly attempts at opening the door, Caroline dismissively flicks at the key card—lodged in the door slot—with a fingernail. “See? It doesn’t work.”

With those marvelous, deep brown eyes, Lucia exudes calm suspicion. Gillian, of course, had warned her that Caroline was _formidable-like, you know, like an old library, but then you go inside and it’s all cozy with books and mushy-looking couches where you can fall asleep, not that I’ve ever done that in a library, mind, well maybe once or twice._ She knows that Caroline thinks if she is denied access to the room, she will reconsider pursuit of a drunken sheep farmer who has probably already blown out Caroline’s credit card with room service consisting of steaks, spaghetti, Wotsit packs, and elaborate sugary cocktails. 

Lucia takes the key card out of the slot, licks a forefinger—an innocuous gesture that nonetheless makes Caroline almost whimper aloud with joy—and rubs at the metal strip of the card. She reinserts it, the door magically clicks open, and a gently withering look convinces Caroline that she would have made a damn good headteacher.

Inside the room, they find Gillian sound asleep. At some point she had kicked off her scuffed heels and tossed her cardigan in the general direction of the chair at the desk, because it now tattily puddles the legs of the chair. She curls lovingly around a thick pillow like John Lennon cradling Yoko Ono on the legendary _Rolling Ston_ e cover and looks so uncharacteristically peaceful and content that Caroline gives serious pause to the prospect of waking her.

“We shouldn’t,” she murmurs at Lucia, while daring to touch—and thoroughly enjoy—a firm bicep. “Let’s go.”

Now Lucia resembles not a headteacher so much as a student facing detention: sulky, defiant. “No?”

“No.”

“Because I am very certain she will wake up if I sing ‘La Marseillaise’—”

“What? Don’t—” Caroline hisses.

“ _Allons enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé—_ ”

Gillian, annoyed because she must be in the middle of that damn French Foreign Legion dream where she is denied croissants simply because she is English—fucking bastards—stirs with a groan. Bleary-eyed and puppyish, she reluctantly releases Pillow Ono and sits up. For a moment she thinks she is still dreaming, because Caz and Lucia are actually in the room. Squinty and suspicious, she glares at them. If these bints think she’s giving up Pillow Ono and the prospect of room service just so they can shag their tits off, they are very much mistaken.

“That were quick,” she mumbles apprehensively.

  
“What? No, we haven’t—” Caroline laughs nervously and playfully swats Lucia’s forearm.

Now Gillian looks sleepy and confused.

“Are you hungry?” Caroline appeals to an appetite that she knows she can definitely fulfill. “Maybe we should have dinner.”

  
Lucia rolls her eyes, and saunters slowly toward the bed with the jaunty confidence of a cougar stalking a crippled beaver. “Gillian,” she purrs, “an idea has occurred to us—”

“Not me,” Caroline interjects.

“No,” Lucia continues, “but it is like your indecent proposal movie—”

Committed as always to the role of the killjoy, Caroline stuffs even more naysaying into the conversation: “Not _really_.”

Before she can once again remind Lucia of the _Indecent Proposal_ plotline, she gets a rather arch, impatient _you hush_ look.

Meanwhile Gillian yawns and rubs at her eyes in such a sweetly vulnerable, terrifically childlike fashion that Caroline flinches guiltily.

The mountain lion metaphor proves apt, for it all happens so quickly Caroline’s champagne-curdled brain has little time to process: Lucia bends over and kisses Gillian with the lingering precision of a miniaturist bent over a delicate canvas. The scene plays out with the quotidian sacredness of a Vermeer in lighting and texture; the porous, dissolving afternoon light suffuses the warm brown of Lucia’s forearm against the white sleeve of her shirt, her dark hand caresses Gillian’s jawline. The bright pattern of Gillian’s dress throws chaos into the composition—just as Gillian herself has done all day long, disrupting the deceptively placid surface of Caroline’s life.

Statement of intent delivered, Lucia breaks off the kiss and, with a proud head tilt, regards Gillian with the same pleasure as a cricket batsman admiring a glorious shot. 

Meanwhile Gillian has the same glazed, slightly stricken look of pleasant, panicked confusion plastered on her face as she did when her father announced he was marrying a woman he hadn’t seen in about sixty years. “Um,” she manages.

“I would like for all of us to happy,” Lucia says. “I think you know what I mean. Don’t you?” She gazes down at Gillian, and along with Caroline waits for the mind-blowing effect of the long, lingering kiss to dissipate, both of them quietly optimistic that Gillian’s mouth may eventually form something beyond an ambiguous syllable.

Alas, Lucia’s kisses are more life-altering than a sleepy, semi-drunken farmer can handle, and Gillian repeats: “Um.”

“Perhaps you need a little time to think? Discuss with your beloved?” Lucia looks back at Caroline, who is in the process of mentally issuing a proclamation that she will never, ever arrange a wedding for anyone else ever again.

The third time is not the charm for Gillian: “Um.”

“No, no, by all means, talk, both of you. I need to use the facilities, if you do not mind, and make a phone call.” She smiles brightly. “Yes?”

Held hostage by beauty, Caroline somehow manages a response: “Sure.”

Lucia disappears into the large bathroom.

Under the weight of all this potential, Caroline’s shoulders sag. She closes her eyes, aggressively massages the bridge of her nose. “This is exhausting,” she mutters aloud, “and no one has even actually fucked yet.”

Gillian remains sitting on the edge of the bed, staring blankly into the void. Time to initiate the foolproof second part of the exit strategy. Gingerly she sits on the bed beside Gillian, who does not register her stepsister’s close proximity until Caroline gently begins, “So.”

Then Gillian blinks wildly, glances at her, and sputters to life: “That, that took a f-f-fucking turn.”

The plan has indeed gone tits up, but not in a way that either of them ever imagined.

“I didn’t know, I’d no idea she—” Gillian says plaintively. The desperate, almost fearful look that she gives Caroline is startling and disturbing, as if she genuinely fears not merely a display of righteous wrath, but Caroline herself. Once again unbidden thoughts of Eddie Greenwood come to mind, fueling that gathering suspicion: _What the hell did that man do to her?_ And once again Caroline puts aside the thought for examination at a later, sober time and focuses on the task at hand: transforming herself from reluctant huntress to supportive wing-woman, assuaging Gillian and wishing her good luck on the double jackpot of one night with Lucia and an omelet extravaganza in the morning. 

In spite of it all, Caroline laughs. “Look, it’s—she fancies you. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sure, I’m disappointed, but I know, God, I know by now, and you should too, that you can’t really pick and choose these things.”

“But this—I mean, Jesus Christ, she’s s-suggesting—”

“I know what’s she’s suggesting, I’m not that naïve.”

Gillian gets a little wild-eyed. “And you, you want—”

“No,” Caroline replies firmly, and rolls out the escape strategy: “Look, I’m going to go. She wants you, so she’s all yours. So I’m removing myself from the equation here, two’s company, three’s a crowd, three is my _least_ favorite prime number anyway, and this is all too rich for my blood.”

She stops. Gillian gawks at the bathroom door and her face scrunches reflexively, as if somehow performing vigorous exercises to burn off the caloric excesses of confusion.

“You know,” Caroline reminds her gently, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

She does not why she is compelled to say this. Gillian is an adult, she knows how to handle herself in these situations—and surely such negotiations are a less dicey, worrisome affair with another woman? _Like you would fucking know_ —but in the moment she appears so strangely vulnerable that it rouses Caroline’s well-developed, ever-present protective instincts.

Gillian runs a hand through bed-head hair and tosses out an absentminded, perfunctory response that hardly reassures: “I know.”

A mutual silence enables them to indulge in the foreplay of Lucia’s French murmurings from the bathroom. Caroline is tempted to ask Gillian if she can understand what is said beyond the door.

Instead, she says what she feels: “It’s lovely, you know.”

And bites back a sigh, as Gillian now looks bewildered and mumbles, “What is?”

“Not _this,_ exactly, just—that you went to all this trouble for me. I know it’s fun for you too, pretending to be a wildlife photographer or a waitress at a cocktail bar and all that, but still, it’s like a, it’s a—” Caroline struggles for the word. “—a kindness, something that I’m not entirely used to anymore. Someone doing a nice thing for me. And it was nice—today was fun, I mean, really fun, even before Venus of Lyon showed up. I haven’t felt so relaxed, or had a real good laugh, in what feels like forever.”

Abashed, Gillian stares at her bare feet; time inchworms along for an eternal minute before she once again turns a weary, confused gaze to the closed bathroom door, as if Lucia is a sexy Jack-in-the-Box ready to spring out at any moment clad in nothing the finest lingerie. If that is indeed the case, Caroline might hang around just for that.

On a rather judgmental spectrum that is purely Carolinian, her overall opinion of Gillian’s morals has not exactly shifted dramatically, but remained fixed at two low points clustered in close proximity: initially demonized as a mindless, grubby slag and later romanticized as a happy-go-lucky libertine. If Caroline has learned anything as a scientist, though, it’s that phenomena flatly captured in a graph or formulaic equation are, in reality, more complex and revelatory than one ever imagines. The elegance of the notation, the symbols and numbers on the page will bloom, beautifully wild, into complex, variable life. So it occurs that this situation could be quite similar to what Gillian speculated earlier about her own relations with Kate. Gillian hasn’t been with a woman in several years now herself; perhaps she too is simply undergoing a lack of nerves.

Be the wingman she deserves! Caroline urges herself. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Almost shyly, Gillian looks down at her feet again. “I guess—I just don’t, don’t understand,” she mumbles, pauses, and nods accusingly at the bathroom door. “I mean, yeah, _her_ —whatever, can’t f-fathom what’s going on her head, but the rest of it, I don’t get.”

“Don’t get what?”

“Don’t get why anyone—” Gillian stops, and then says slowly: “Can’t wrap my head around why anyone who’s ever had you would ever give you up, pass you by so easy.”

Not this again, Caroline thinks. “I told you—” Her voice, cresting, crackles with anger.

“Yeah, an’ I told you I don’t believe it. That stuff—sex—when you’re right with someone, I mean, really, really right and you want to make it even righter, it falls into place.”

“Nobody’s right with me. Nobody has been, nobody ever will be at this rate.”

“Come on, Caz,” Gillian scoffs softly. “You’re not one to pity yourself.”

“Christ.” Caroline pinches the bridge of her nose again, but this time so fiercely that she can feel thunderbolts of pain striking each eye. “It’s—because—” 

There is a litany of dysfunction that she has composed, culled from various critical albeit primary sources in her life. If she gives breath to it, if she makes it known, something terrible will twist inside her, like a bullet or a blade, and rip her apart beyond repair. Wouldn’t it? But doesn’t Gillian, who has been so kind to her today, deserve to know the full rotten truth of the woman behind the façade?

“Because what?” Gillian prompts.

“I’m arrogant, inept, selfish, repressed, and emotionally crippled.” Was it Kate who called her emotionally crippled? Her mother who called her inept and selfish? John who called her arrogant and repressed? She no longer remembers. The words should be sown into her skin, woven in blood as eternal reminders of her shortcomings, her body rendered as a signpost for anyone who dares to touch her again.

This litany of dysfunction, these five theses nailed to the door of her heart, are nothing short of a siren song for the likes of Gillian Greenwood.

Gillian’s hand cups her neck, the heat and lines of her palm merging against the carotid artery. In the attenuated stillness of the hotel room, the swerve of Gillian’s dry thumb across Caroline’s cheekbone hisses over skin, a bowstring filling the gap after the note is played, the song is sung. Her eyes are _so fucking unreal._ _Wildwood, wormwood—_

“Perfect,” Gillian says.

_Perfect._ Ever-elusive desire sought, now found.

**_ii. wildwood, wormwood_ **

One week after Trinity Sunday the term is over, June climbs high toward summer solstice and she’s on the Isis in a punt, how many years has she been here and she’s never been on the river in a punt, she’s only watched, only observed, but that’s going to change everything, she’s going to start living life the way she wants, and today she’s with Marian who has broken up with her girlfriend for like the fourth time in two months and they’re not talking _again_ and Marian’s friend Dan, who is a perpetual student and tutor and a little older, like 29, practically ancient, but the member of their little boating party who matters most is Tara, a mate of Dan’s who rarely speaks in public and who Caroline has had the vaguest, maddest crush on the entire bloody academic term because Tara is magnificent and skulks around in either a tweed overcoat or a leather jacket all the time—although today she’s dressed in a white button-down and summery Oxford bags as if she’s an extra in _Brideshead Revisited_ —and earlier at the garden party they were all at Dan had finally confirmed Tara does like girls and then whispered _her thesis is about Wittgenstein and time, she’s brilliant,_ and Caroline would rather take calculus again than listen to anything about philosophy but really, she’d do about anything to get Tara to speak to her, fuck, maybe she’ll have to read Wittgenstein now, and Tara stands in the bow of the punt with the pole, pushing them along, and Caroline cannot clearly see her face, just the strong column of her pale neck from underneath the ragged bob of dark brown hair, the flexion and extension of her sinewy arms as she steers the boat, Dan is talking about someone named Madame George, no, it’s a song, and he fiddles about with a cassette in the boombox, earlier they had been listening to Debussy, then Erasure, talk about quintessential gay playlists, and now this: a violin that sways in merry lazy time with the stately thump and swish of the punt, and the sky hazy white and hot and she faces the glare and waits for the girl to turn around so that she can see those clear green eyes, vibrant as a cricket lawn, a summer wood, wildwood, wormwood—she waits, she stares up into the white haze of the summer sky, and, encouraged by Van Morrison’s growly croon— _that’s when you fall_ —waits for something to happen, for something to change, she waits to fall through the summer sky into the wildwood, wormwood—

**_iii. enchantment_ **

Gillian’s kiss, this soft gift neither unexpected nor unwelcome, deepens so slowly and skillfully that breathlessness, the sensation of drowning, is viscerally real and Caroline must break it off. Her tongue limns a spell over Gillian’s lips as a promise of return. Patience, however, has never been Gillian’s forte and before Caroline can even entertain second thoughts or idle contemplation of what lies ahead, Gillian picks a fight with Caroline’s jacket, engaging in a frenetic push-pull with the fabric until it slinks to the floor in defeat. 

More kissing follows, and as she falls back on the bed she thinks of the punt on the river that day, the serpentine pull of the water, because the warm blossom of Gillian’s tongue in her mouth holds the same mysterious sway of the tide rolling in and rolling out, ceaselessly teasing possibilities. Gillian’s hand slides up under her shirt, cups her breast, retreats, and sets to work on undoing the buttons; her own hand gathers up the fabric of Gillian’s dress, fingers gliding on the back of a muscular thigh, she pushes upward in hopes of some kind of instant, temporary gratification—

Then—gloriously detached, floating on a dream—a closeup of navy-blue trousers as beguiling as the sea, the delicate bones of a long, elegant hand floating against this saturated blue. Lucia stands beside the bed, gazing down at them, not so much aroused as clearly amused at the breaching of some kind of threesome etiquette.

Not that there was supposed to be a threesome. This wasn’t supposed to happen, isn’t supposed to happen. As always, Caroline seeks desperate solace in principled thoughts. _No matter how much you’ve wanted it from the start, no matter the mess of your heart._

An unfortunate life pattern now recurs for Gillian: caught in flagrante with the wrong party. She hastily, guiltily disengages from a frustrated, teenaged attempt at tearing off a very expensive bra and sits up while straddling Caroline. But the heat of her cunt remains pressed against a very fine and favored pair of work pants—the neutral affection for which will be permanently altered when Caroline wears them about a fortnight later, starts thinking of them as _threesome trousers,_ and promptly puts them in a bin marked for charity donation. 

As Gillian pushes wild hair out of her face, Caroline is fairly certain she is about to stammer out a _sorry_ —to whom and for what, God only knows—when Lucia leans in and kisses her again.

There are mornings in the valley where the fog and dew gathered through the night burns away and the astonishing clarity of the air and the sky remind Caroline of why she has remained close to home. So a lifelong haze of jealousy, inadequacy, and longing now evaporates to reveal unexpected beauty. It’s fucking beautiful, she thinks, the two of them together, an unlikely perfection; an equation on paper that unfurls in the air with stunning results. Surrendering to a natural role of observer, she revels in the moment. That the anticipated course of action for this unpredictable enterprise takes a left turn at Albuquerque, so to speak, should not surprise Caroline.

In Lucia’s prolonged and increasingly arduous round of kissing with Gillian their wet mouths ripen and the waning silvery light catches a fine, gleaming, gossamer thread of spit connecting them. Blindly searching, Gillian stretches out a hand. At first Caroline thinks she seeks support to balance herself, to keep from toppling over from the dazzling lightheadedness of snogging the goddess. Instead, her hand waves lightly over Caroline’s bare stomach until what is sought is finally found: Caroline’s hand. Covering it with her own, Gillian squeezes and caresses, her thumb tucks into the plush haven of Caroline’s palm, their hands writhe together until their fingers interlock and she is spectator no more.

Before she can raise their joined hands to her mouth, Lucia changes the course again. She stops the kiss with Gillian, bites her neck for good measure. With a questioning tug at the hem of Gillian’s dress that gets a go-ahead nod, she elegantly rakes the dress over Gillian’s head with Houdini-like nonchalance.

This impressive trick completed, Caroline cannot bask in the delicious reveal of Gillian in bra and panties because the bloody dress settles over her head like a humble multicolored shroud. Briefly Caroline wonders if Gillian wears men’s deodorant, or emits some sort of butch pheromone that bullies all other secretions into submission, because for a delirious moment she thinks she could be quite content languishing under this seductively scented tent for a while, but then she would be missing—oh shit, what is she missing?

Irritably, she bats away the dress.

There really _ought_ to be an etiquette primer on threesomes, she thinks, but now is not the time for googling, now is the time for ogling—rather, appreciating—what goes on. Gillian falls back on the bed beside Caroline. Lucia’s impatience undermines her typical elegance as she unbuckles her pants and trips out of them. Then, competing at an Olympic level in the sport of disrobing, every other article of clothing on her body is in a soft heap on a chair before Caroline can even register the state of _naked._

Lucia’s body does not disappoint: the sweet swell of her breasts, the strong shoulders, the full, satisfying curves of her belly, thighs, ass, all of it converging at the glorious triangular intersection between her legs, and once again Caroline’s brain prompts, _this is not happening, is it?_

  
Another futile distraction of thought, because she realizes that Gillian is also naked but now lusciously camouflaged by Lucia’s body, and Caroline feels like an aging journeyman on the cusp on retirement who is generously subbed into the last minute of the World Cup—completely outclassed and intimidated beyond measure, but ready to play. So she watches a bit more, idly wonders if this is what it’s like to watch porn—despite John’s timidly persistent suggestions, she’s never done so—but no, this is only confirmation of what she already knows deeply, instinctually: reality, the space between the imagination and its idealized images, is infinitely superior.

Not one to be topped for long, Gillian reverses course, flipping Lucia on her back. While Lucia remains happily pinned, Gillian leans over and kisses Caroline in the same soft, beguiling fashion as the first time, her touch shimmies along Caroline’s jaw and throat and when Caroline can breathe again, she whispers _Puck_ against Gillian’s lips.

Merrily confused, Gillian squints, laughs. “What?”

In response, Caroline kisses her back.

All playful petulance to the forefront, Lucia sighs dramatically. “Is there a reason I am on my back?”

Gillian responds with similar lightheartedness: “Right, right. There is, there is.” She kisses Lucia again, quickly, reassuringly, and then tosses a significant glance at Caroline. “I was thinking—”

Oh Christ, she _is_ being subbed in. Is that really what they call it? Whenever she thinks of sport _at all,_ all she can summon up is the deafening roar of vuvuzelas and English drunkards and unfortunately that now drowns out all rational thought.

Even as she addresses Gillian, Lucia smiles warmly at them both. “Gillian.”

Charmed at her name enveloped in a French purr, Gillian smiles again. “Yeah?”

“You are a good thinker.”

Gillian smoothly slides off Lucia, and the world is now Caroline’s for the taking. There is nothing to do but shed her clothes—confidence buoyed along by both parties’ appreciation of her tits, always a crowd pleaser—and dive in.

Caroline is a good kisser and she marks a very languorous journey in and around Lucia’s lush mouth while only mildly distracted and aroused by Gillian’s long, slow stroking of her back, from the nape of her neck to the dip above her ass. Lucia, however, is less patient and is bucking, grinding against her in anticipation, and when she breathes _please_ into Caroline’s ear just before biting it, well, the Goddess of Lyon cannot be denied.

Enthusiasm easily passes itself off as expertise only on the shallowest of levels. When everything with Kate had increased in its intensity and inevitability, Caroline decided she could not rely on faulty memories of sex with twentysomething graduate students and sought fresh counsel on how to properly go down on a woman. In other words, she googled—and despite awareness of John’s technological ineptitude, promptly deleted her browser history afterward. The internet, however, provided little in the way of practical guidance and the many articles she encountered always said something setting the mood with romantic baths and candles and aromatherapy—she wanted a mucky weekend, not a fucking spa date—and one especially idiotic piece of advice suggested that one spell out the alphabet with the tongue whilst doing the deed, as if the vulva were a chalkboard in a remedial learning classroom.

Well, Caroline thinks as she capers eagerly down Lucia’s body—then making a greedy return to those firm, sweet breasts with their dark nipples, while discreetly grinding against Lucia’s thigh—this woman deserves more than the alphabet, she deserves an oeuvre of Proustian length and complexity.

“ _Maintenant,_ ” Lucia groans.

Ever helpful—and momentarily unoccupied except for cuddling with Pillow Ono—Gillian translates: “That means ‘now.’”

“I _know_ what it means,” Caroline hisses, and several things yank her back from the yawning abyss of bitchiness: (1) She’s fairly certain it’s bad form to bicker during a threesome. (2) How a blunt one-syllable English imperative translates into a gloriously smooth French command, the syllables intertwine effortlessly, a threesome of language. (3) How incredibly beautiful Gillian is, and how stupid it is that she never noticed it previously but of course, she’s never seen Gillian naked before. (4) How lucky she will be if she has the energy and creativity left to have a proper go at Gillian after this.

She is momentarily torn between the two, until the rigorous academic strictures that bind her personally and professionally kick in: _Focus on the task at hand._ She settles between Lucia’s thighs, allows herself to bask in both Lucia’s scent and the texture of her folds, her clit. _Gladly._ She lets her mind off its leash.

Imagine the alphabet? Imagine a map of the Dales? Imagine the treacherous route of the M60? No. Imagine the roads that twist and twine tales across the land, the whole of England, the wild country you know in legend only. Imagine sculling the Isis, cupping your hand against the onrush of water. Imagine the sea in your mouth, entirely. Imagine Xenophon hearing the words breaking back through the ranks: the sea, the sea. Imagine her body as the sea, the wave, the swell, the rood, the salt in your mouth.

When Lucia comes—bare heels scrabbling against the sheet, gasping and moaning in French that Caroline definitely does not understand, and yet she is grateful for no _translation interruptus_ —Caroline rides the wave to the edge of exhaustion. As Lucia’s breathing sorts itself into a sleepy rhythm, she is on the verge of passing out herself, pillowed upon one heavenly thigh.

Falling through the brilliant sky of this dream and into another—the punt, the Isis, the summer day—Caroline is gently pulled away, and the sensation of falling, this sublime disorientation goes on and on because she rolls over and she’s looking up into Gillian’s face, and before she can make the most mundane of compliments— _your eyes are amazing,_ but really, she thinks, Gillian deserves the Proust treatment too, those eyes alone would earn a volume, call it _du côté de chez Greenwood_ —she gets kissed once more, and more.

She welcomes it all: Gillian’s tongue, warm and full in her mouth, her body on Caroline’s, her thighs part and her legs wrap around Gillian’s waist as Gillian’s mouth roams wild and nomadic over her throat and breasts, Caroline’s fingers dig and rake into her strong shoulders, mining the duality of Gillian’s softness and strength and she feels so good Caroline thinks she could come through this touch alone, but fortunately that’s not the case because Gillian is now inside her, latching onto her rhythm and Caroline tightens around each thrust and each movement, taking from Gillian all she can, until she no longer knows who’s taking the lead, but perhaps it doesn’t matter, perhaps they are both dominant followers, stubborn supplicants. She is certain of nothing anymore but that in the midst of this mad beauty, Gillian keeps her grounded. Gillian has led her into this enchantment, Gillian will lead her home.


	8. wanderlust

> It’s not what you have known,
> 
> But what you have forgotten.
> 
> —James Langlas, from _A Loss of Memory_

**_i._ _the shortcut_ **

Gillian has always referred to it as _the shortcut_ : a sinewy dirt road that shaves about twenty minutes off the drive to the farmhouse, miraculously picked up near a dizzying roundabout somewhere off the A58 close to Sowerby Bridge, and not recommended for compact cars or any vehicle, really, during bouts of inclement weather.

But the morning is bright and sunny, even if the passengers of the Jeep Cherokee rumbling furiously down the shortcut are not.

Earlier Caroline woke up alone in the hotel room: naked, hungover, and despite everything that happened the night prior, essentially unchanged. No overnight transformation into a suave, confident Casanova floating on a cloud of sexual satisfaction occurred, which disappointed bitterly, as did the first thing she laid eyes on: Not Lucia’s flawless breasts nor the callipygian perfection of Gillian’s ass, but an over-coiffed talking head of the BBC’s _Breakfast_ , mercifully muted, on the telly. On the nightstand a half-empty water bottle anchored a scrawled note from Gillian: _At breakfast bar._

Before showering, she made the ill-fated decision to check her mobile, where she ingested a noxious, hysterical word stew of texts and missed calls from Lawrence, John, and even William. It took ten minutes to piece together that while his son was in his care John went AWOL for half the night, Lawrence freaked out, William intervened, and Kate—Kate, of all people—swooped in and set things right. All the same, she couldn’t tell if Lawrence was home yet or back at the flat John shared with Judith. She didn’t have the energy yet to call John and scream at him for endless minutes; it would prove more effective to do that in person anyway. She couldn’t focus on anything but Kate’s name in her head, Kate’s presence tangentially touching the corners of her life once more.

Once showered, dressed, and hyperventilated, she went downstairs, shotgunned some coffee, settled the bill—fucking Lucia did charge them for that second bottle of champagne—and dragged Gillian away from her third omelet (spinach and feta) of the morning.

Sensing the mood, Gillian has been sullen and slouched but also, as usual, fidgety as a five-year-old. Once they hit the shortcut she slumps lower in pursuit of the slanting sun, closing her eyes as the Jeep rhumbas over a particularly rough patch in the road and Caroline wonders why she’s not upchucking all those omelets. She also wonders why Gillian seems so laissez-faire about what happened last night—at least she appears that way, fundamentally unchanged, as if nothing happened. Well if you haven’t changed, you miserable numpty, why would you expect it of her? she thinks.

And what the sweet fuck would Kate think if she knew about this? It’s not surprising that Kate would take care of Lawrence like that; she would have done so for any of her students or any kid in a crisis, really. Still, Caroline cannot help but wonder if it’s a sign that she should attempt some kind of reconciliation. Perhaps enough time has passed that she can be forgiven the sins of her stupidities? Even this one?

She glances at Gillian, who shifts and squirms again, tugging irritably at the seat beat, which presses ominously against her throat. The same throat so thoroughly kissed and nipped and licked the night before. _My only regret is that I didn’t get a chance to go down on you._

Her mind, so fluent in the pathways of time, still enjoys treacherously tossing so many entrancing obstacles in her way.

The mere thought prompts a swerve of the Jeep, but it doesn’t register with Gillian—a passionate student of the hills and dales, she is currently so absorbed in the skyline she thinks the bumpy ride is nothing more than the usual dips and hazards of the shortcut.

Then she looks at Caroline and opens her mouth but, thinking better of saying whatever she was going to say, quickly closes it.

This time Caroline swallows the sigh and the chaser of irritation that comes with it; only barely does it modulate her tone. “What?”

Gillian hesitates before blurting out the question that has apparently plagued her more than anything else in the past 24 hours: “Did she really say ‘sacre bleu’ at some point?”

“You know, she did.”

It feels like they’ve been on the road forever.

Caroline squints into the endless horizon. “I really think she did.”

_**ii. London** _

_Well._ Caroline addresses the face in the mirror _. It’s not the craziest thing you’ve ever done._

In the morning, the mirror can be merciless. But on this particular morning—after showering, dressing, fixing her hair, and styling her makeup—Caroline is pleased to discover a tolerable amount of aging and self-loathing. Maybe it’s the new eyeliner? At any rate, the whole ensemble and overall demeanor don’t seem half-bad for a 51-year-old up half the night shagging.

_Now that you’re done with smirking and congratulating yourself,_ the mirror retorts, _you’re still late for the first meeting of the conference._

“Shit” is said aloud. She drops the eyeliner and lipstick into her purse and dashes out of the bathroom.

She never thought of Olga as the entrepreneurial type. But a year ago, not long after Caroline officially nixed their relations, she sold her business and went all in for bigger and better operations in London: a high-end wine shop and plans to open up a cocktail lounge with an old mate from school. Judging by the swank loft apartment in Hackney, Olga was doing more than all right. Upon her arrival in London last night for the independent schools conference, Caroline had, on a whim, called her up. She had expected a perfunctory if friendly chat over a glass of wine and nothing more; instead it turned into a long dinner, drinks with a lot of wonderful young queer people, and the hopeless temptation—looming larger than the actual prospect of sex—of Olga’s loft because if there was one kind of porn Caroline liked, it was house porn. At any rate, the glorious intersection of lust and architecture resulted in crossing off a bucket list item of getting fucked on an Italian marble countertop.

Olga is still in bed, scowling at her phone, when Caroline skitters in from bathroom in stockinged feet. She glances at her own phone, sees the calendar reminder about the conference meeting, and ignores that to smile once more at the photo Gillian had sent this morning, of Flora violently hugging a very tolerant, cross-eyed lamb, and its accompanying text: _If she kills any sheep it’s coming out of your pocket._

Olga lowers her mobile, runs a hand through gorgeously messy hair. “Sure you don’t want any tea? Coffee?”

Probably hoping I’ll offer to make it, Caroline thinks. Olga followed a teenager’s creed—never expand energy when it’s likely someone else will do it for you; fortunately, she wasn’t like that in bed. “Thanks, no, they should have some at the meeting.” Hopping, she tugs at the stubborn back of her right heel until it surrenders. “I should be able to find a cab back to the hotel, shouldn’t I?”

“Sure. Best bet a few blocks over on Mare Road.”

Caroline sighs lazily. “God. Walking over there in heels—”

“Don’t you have an app? Something for cabs? Or Uber?”

“Do I look like the type of person who has an app?”

“Same old Caroline.” Olga laughs, and taps at her mobile. “I’ll send for one.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorted.” Tossing the phone on the nightstand, Olga sits up excitedly; if Caroline will inwardly groan at what is about to be said, she will hardly object to more naked flesh on display. “All right, so I’m going to say it one last time: You should move to London.”

It was the conversational refrain of last night: _You should live in London,_ repeated ad infinitum in the place of truly compelling arguments, and in the hopes of wearing down the opposition. Olga has always reminded her of the cheeky kid in class who thinks he’s going to end up at Oxford or Cambridge when in fact he’ll be lucky to get a place at London Met. While disabusing others has shown itself to be her life’s work, it is nonetheless exhausting, particularly when you have to do it for what was supposedly a no-strings-attached night of passion.

She sighs. “Olga.”

“No, really. I’m totally serious, you’d be snapped up in a flash—there’s loads of posh schools here. _And_ being in London would be better for Flora, you know that.”

She knows that Olga didn’t have the easiest time growing up in the North. But the demographics back home are changing, attitudes are changing. That and she cannot bear to take Flora away from all she knows: her father, grandparents, brother, Calamity, and Gillian. A week before the trip Caroline had casually joked with Gillian about moving to London and was surprised when Gillian had slumped in shock against the kitchen wall. _You, you’re really thinking about it?_

She had laughed, snapped Gillian on the arm with a well-aimed flick of the kitchen towel, and said, _don’t be ridiculous._ Knowing fair well she could not bear to take herself away from it all.

“I’m happy where I am.” She tugs and smooths out a stocking. “And I think Flora is too.” While she is more than ready to go, she remains plagued by sexual etiquette. Thankfully, she never had to worry about the embarrassment of final words with Lucia— _so long, thanks for all the fucks_ would have seemed woefully inadequate. And as for the Gillian part of that equation, it is buried history, unearthed strata pummeled into dust by subsequent avalanches of death and spouses; unearthing it into the light of day would signify certain disintegration all around. Under no circumstances could she afford to lose Gillian.

The minor epiphany brings her up straight. Stiffening, wide-eyed, she stares out the window. She has never truly thought with any kind of clarity beyond the strangeness, the strength, the seeming inevitability of her bond with Gillian. It is love, a kind of love. But what kind? And what of it?

“You all right?” Olga asks.

“Yeah.” Caroline blinks the thought away for now; time to wrap this up. “Um. I had a good time last night. And it was good to see you. Thank you.”

“Great,” Olga drawls in a defeated tone. She flops back into the comfy countryside of pillows and blankets and attempts joking: “That’ll be 500 quid, love.”

“Oh, my dear.” Caroline laughs and pulls on her coat. “You always did mark up your merchandise a bit too high, didn’t you?”

_**iii. Barcelona** _

The hotel suite’s tiny balcony, fortified with ornate, old wrought iron railings, overlooks a quiet plaza in the Old City. The balcony seems barely big enough to fit two adults, let alone two adults and two children, so upon arrival the very first thing Caroline did was to forbid everyone from being on the balcony _all at once_ , and Flora and Calamity could _only_ be on the balcony with an adult—preferably Gillian because Gillian weighed less, but she did not add this last bit because thankfully her self-loathing was taking a bit of a holiday as well. After this edict Calamity and Gillian mockingly saluted her, and Flora, well accustomed to the plethora of maternal rules and protocols governing her life, only rolled her eyes.

As it turns out, the balcony pales in excitement to the weird and wonderful joys of Spanish telly, and the girls are currently absorbed in a very shouty, brightly colored game show. Flora seems convinced that if she pays very careful attention—a nearly impossible feat with Calamity bounding around the room half the time—she will become fluent in Spanish.

So for the moment, and in a lovely coda to this perfect day, Caroline has the balcony overlooking the city to herself. She even dares to lean on the iron railing for a few minutes, inviting death and destruction as she visualizes it crumbling and detaching from the building—

 _All right. Enough of that._ The warm, gilt-edged evening expands before her, and a brand-new glittering silver bracelet dangles from her wrist. After a morning at the Palau Nacional and a light lunch al fresco, they walked through an outdoor flea market. A stall filled with beautiful handcrafted jewelry, including an impressive table display of silver bracelets, caught her eye. She dawdled over them until Gillian picked one for her and sought Flora’s approval on it, all while Calamity ignored them and played with the jewelry-maker’s cat. Even during their afternoon siesta, she couldn’t stop admiring it; she laid in bed, both girls snoozing beside her, stretching out her arm and admiring the rakish silver dangling from her wrist. When she wasn’t looking at the bracelet she would glance toward the balcony where, at that particular angle, she could see nothing but Gillian’s blue-jeaned legs, wriggling bare feet, and the occasional fluttering edges of the book she read ( _Don Quixote,_ of course).

Now Gillian stands in the balcony’s doorway, bottle of wine in hand, glaring back at the kids inside. “Oi. Don’t monkey about with that remote. You accidentally buy any movies, you’ll be paying for them one way or the other.”

“Maybe we should just take the remote from them,” Caroline suggests.

Stepping onto the balcony, Gillian tops off their wine glasses with the last of the Rioja and sits the bottle next to the glasses on a very tiny multicolored plastic table—the only chintzy bit of furniture in the entire suite, and as such oddly endearing.

She flaps a dismissive hand at Caroline’s face. “Always the head bitch, even on vacation, eh? You’ve got the parental controls or mind control set up or whatever—” Gillian says.

“Mind control, what an excellent idea.”

“Wouldn’t put it past you. They’ll be fine.” She downs her glass and nods at Caroline’s bespangled wrist. “Let’s have another look.”

Caroline’s shoulders twitch a barely perceptible, needless consent; before they bought it, Gillian had spent several minutes studying the bracelet with the intensity of a master silversmith before declaring _this is the one_ —so why another inspection is warranted, she doesn’t know. But she offers her arm and Gillian takes her hand, slowly turning her wrist this way and that with a careful, rhythmic, precision, admiring the setting sun’s burnishing of the silver, and the intricate, needle-sharp lines of the engraved floral motif melting in the evening sun.

Then the world stops turning, or at least her wrist does; she doesn’t pull away, Gillian doesn’t let go. Gillian’s thumb runs slow and light over the back of her hand and everything forgotten is remembered. That it is so easily exposed, so completely recalled—a memory palace magically springs up in the desolate landscape of her mind—terrifies her. _The way she kissed, the way she touched, the way she took my hand._

While wandering and aimless two days ago, they turned a street corner and quite unexpectedly found themselves staring up at Casa Vicens, one of Gaudi’s early houses, now a museum. Confrontation with its strange beauty gave a visceral shock; she stopped dead, puzzled by the shroud of deja-vu settling over her senses. The house of memory possesses a star’s fixation and visibility; clarity can hide it, dreams can arouse it.

Caroline flutters and inhales sharply. Gillian exhales and swallows visibly—and, releasing Caroline’s hand, bolts back into the hotel room. “Hey, guess what! It’s Tapas Tuesday!” she shouts at the girls.

In response, Flora and Calamity shriek in unison, and in such ear-shredding decibels of delight that Caroline reminds herself that while she loves both of them to bits, the sudden urge to gag and shove them in a closet will pass like a summer storm. What she currently feels, however, is a different matter; she doubts it will pass with similar ease. The summer evening shimmers; she remembers.

Meanwhile, Flora comes to her senses and issues a calm, adult-like retort: “Auntie Gillian, it’s Thursday _._ ”

_**iv. Blair Atholl** _

If as recently as five years ago, someone had told Caroline that someday she would be driving two ewes named Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield to a remote village in Scotland, she would have, depending on mood and level of alcohol consumed, laughed or pitched an exquisitely disbelieving fit.

Yet here she is, winding north on the A9 to another country.

Gillian sits in the passenger seat of the Land Rover, sulky and scowling at the sublime Scottish countryside, her right arm in a sling as a result of recent surgery to repair a partially torn rotator cuff, and with her usual resistance to asking anyone for help currently ratcheted up to a thousand. It is bad enough that she must rely on Raff and Ellie more than usual, which included the task of hitching the transport to the Land Rover and then loading and settling the ewes into it; neither one could manage the day off for the journey, however, so it fell to Caroline to offer her chauffeuring services.

The drive to the village of Blair Atholl took over five hours, broken up with stops here and there so that Caroline could stretch her legs and hit the loo and Gillian could check on the ewes, fussing and fretting and frowning balefully at their delicately judgmental, furry faces. She hadn’t wanted to part with them, but the novice gentleman farmer—who was not nearly organic but fully organic—had overpaid handsomely for them, and under current circumstances she could not resist the lure of such easy lucre. She faces a winter hunkering down in recovery mode from the _bloody busted shoulder_ as she calls it.

After the ewes were deposited at their new home, the divorced gentleman farmer flirted with them both, offered tea, and before Gillian could snarl out a tactless reply Caroline genteelly begged off, citing the long drive back to Yorkshire. Instead they found a tea shop nearby, located in an old mill near the river and there celebrated Gillian’s financial windfall without undertaking the endurance course of obligatory heterosexuality. Caroline casually stabbed at a salad as one-armed Gillian made short work of a stack of tea sandwiches while grousing about the moneyed gentleman farmer—“f-fucking twat, this is just a side gig to him, he don’t understand the first thing about sheep”—and she waited patiently to see if Gillian noticed that (1) she was wearing the Barcelona bracelet, which normally she only wore on holidays and special occasions, and (2) she was not wearing her wedding ring.

Earlier that morning, at the dawning of the 2,049th day since her death, more precisely 6:19 a.m., Kate put in what was a rare appearance these days. Caroline always hoped for these spiritual manifestations to occur at more convenient times, like when she was bored and loading the dishwasher or zoning out at a professional development meeting, but perhaps Kate has other assignations on her celestial calendar that day, like jam sessions with Nina Simone, Prince, and Franz Liszt, or maybe, just maybe, she was subtly prepping Caroline for the possibility of spending the rest of her life with a sheep farmer. At any rate, Kate’s commentary was more pointed than usual. She sat cross-legged on the bed beside Ruth and, while giving the dog gentle head-scrunchies, also gave Caroline a rather pitying look and said: _Do you really want to sleep with a dog the rest of your life?_

On cue, Ruth had groaned, drooled, and rolled onto her back, offering herself up as a furry odalisque.

Caroline is ready. She has known this for some time now. Yet the opportunities afforded her thus far seem truly dismal: the twentysomethings at Hebden Women’s Disco who pay her court, and half the time they are only doing so to grill her about the availability of life-of-the-party Gillian, who can’t stay off the dance floor during New-Wave Wednesdays, and then there was Judith, still persistent after all these months, now texting Caroline absurdist gems such as, _You are as delectable as the Japanese ice cream they call mochi. You, with your soft-hard shell and your creamy coolness!_ Not to mention the epic failure of targeting a damaged, traumatized, and terribly homophobic woman as the object of her affection—after that fiasco, she began to doubt her own tastes and instincts. Perhaps years in the wilderness of grief altered her chemical makeup, damaged her receptors; she’s an aging animal who can no longer detect the scent of danger or death.

There is, however, the sweet, easy temptation of the devil you know.

The one you regret not kissing on a balcony in Barcelona a year ago. The one who roared with laughter and said _mad bitch!_ when you showed her Judith’s text about the Japanese ice cream. The one who gazes at you so adoringly at times that all the bints at the disco are on to you both and say shit like, _your ex still has a thing for you, I’m not getting in the middle of that unless you want me to, if you know what I mean._

One threesome in a lifetime, however, is enough.

The low-grade frustration of it all, exacerbated by Gillian’s understandable grumpiness as of late, led Raff to pull her aside this morning before they set off to ask if they’d had a row. Not so much a row, she wanted to say, as nearly seven years of infernal combustion coming to a head. Like one of those underground fires, a man-made—rather, woman-made—disaster, a conflagration conveniently ignored. People die, things change. You grow accustomed to the world burning under your feet.

The problem is, she doesn’t know how to tell Gillian that the world is on fire. Hence the half-assed subtlety of not wearing the wedding ring. As they headed north this morning, with Gillian fading in and out of sleep and anger, she reconsidered not only this dubious approach, but the whole bloody thing. Now wasn’t the time. When not doped up on painkillers, Gillian worried about making a full recovery for farmwork in the spring—the doctor’s firm assurances to the contrary—and brooded more than usual about money. Despite ogling some habitués of Hebden Women’s Disco—not to mention the beefy young contractor who appeared to be eternally roped into doing grunt work and repairs for Celia—she seemed profoundly uninterested in serious pursuit of romantic companionship. If she said she wanted a husband, it was because her able-bodied son now had a life and career of his own, and she missed having a true dogsbody to boss around on the farm. 

Sandwiches now consumed, Gillian sits back and her gaze sweeps over the few innocuous customers in the tea shop. A dangerous glint builds in her eyes, and Caroline doesn’t need to see it to know that under the table her leg judders a mile a minute. Caroline realizes she is bored, but unlike Flora or Calamity will not be easily distracted by a shiny game on the mobile. She knows this because she tried it only a couple hours ago and Gillian got so frustrated with Candy Crush she nearly flung Caroline’s phone out the window.

As Gillian leans toward her conspiratorially, Caroline refrains mightily from grabbing the collar of her flannel shirt and reeling her in for a kiss; that, she realizes now, would be a better approach for this blunt woman rather than decorous, quasi-Jane Austen gestures. _Pray, Mrs. Greenwood! Do you not notice the bald, bold intent of my ring finger?_

“Maybe we should circle back and rescue them,” Gillian says in a low voice.

“Rescue who?” Caroline asks innocently, as if she doesn’t know.

“Jayne and Sophia.”

“You mean Flossie and Dossie, Tossie—what’s he calling them now?”

“Jesus Christ.” Gillian hisses violently between her teeth. The banal renaming of the beloved ewes had been the final indignity.

Caroline sips her tea. “You cannot rescue other people’s legal property.”

Defeated, Gillian slumps, does another reconnaissance of the tea shop. “Fancy a drink?”

“I’m driving.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re on painkillers.”

“You’re not a bloody doc—all right you are, _technically,_ but I don’t need shit about it.” 

Caroline sighs.

Gillian frowns. “Are you—cross with me?”

Said in that particularly hesitant manner, it’s a salient if painful reminder to Caroline that Gillian spent a decade perpetually monitoring the unpredictable emotional tides of an abusive, drunken bastard.

“No, no, not at all. I’m sorry—I’m just tired.” Admitting it, of course, makes the exhaustion hit even harder. Instinctively she flexes her left hand, curls it into a fist, still unaccustomed to the strange but not unpleasant lightness of no metal circling the ring finger. The bracelet, warmed by her skin, presses gently into her wrist.

Then she notices Gillian looking at her hand. She is almost afraid to look up into Gillian’s face, but she’s come this far. Years ago, she trusted this woman in a risky gamble, an irresistible temptation, an unfathomable decision she dared not face on her own. Now she trusts once more, and if her cheeks burn it is not through love or desire alone but also shame, perhaps, that this paltry gesture is not enough and Gillian deserves far, far better than the likes of her.

Serves me right, she thinks, as Gillian abruptly looks away and exaggeratedly examines the autumnal foliage surrounding the river; the plate-glass wall of the tea shop offers a full view of the frothy, slate-colored river cradled in a patchwork quilt of green and brown, orange and gold. 

“Haven’t been to Scotland much,” Gillian finally says. “Have you?”

“Um. No.” Caroline’s mind is a beautiful blank. _Scotland. What is Scotland? Is it merely this wild precipice in my mind, this mental cliff where I’m about to fall?_

“I’ve always wanted to go to the, the Hebrides. Looks beautiful up there, really wild, gorgeous. That’s where they made that old film— _I Know Where I’m Going!_ Ever seen it?”

Caroline shakes her head.

“Yeah, it’s good. Really good. It were on telly a few weeks ago, and I made Calam settle down and watch it with me. She usually hates to watch real old movies—‘Gran, it’s black and white, it’s boring’—but she got caught up in this one. Anyway, Wendy Hiller—remember her? No?—she, she plays this woman who is supposed to be marrying this wealthy fellow, he’s her boss or summat, they’re getting married in the Hebrides, but when she arrives there she meets this other fella and she starts fancying him. But she’s real stubborn, see, determined to do what she set out to do, which is marry this other bloke, so she gets in this little f-fucking boat in the middle of a _raging_ storm—she’s trying to get to her fiancé on another island, see, and they end up getting caught in a whirlpool, and even as you think she’s a complete mad bitch and she’s not only going to get herself killed but also the poor bastards who’re with her, and you’re _already_ thinking she’s a tosser for picking the wrong fella anyway—yeah, despite all this, you _weirdly_ admire her. Because she’s always strong, always herself. You know? So anyways me and Calam, we’re watching this, seeing poor old bloody Wendy Hiller almost drown, and you know what Calam says?” 

Caroline shakes her head. Calamity is like a miniature Graham Norton: relentlessly quotable and entirely unpredictable.

“She says, ‘you know, this crazy lady reminds me of Auntie Caz.’” Triumphant in the denouement and yet uneasy at its reception, Gillian smiles nervously and guffaws softly.

Caroline cannot fathom how to even process this anecdote—yes, she’s stubborn, she’ll never change, she will lead fools to their deaths in a Scottish whirlpool in a quest for whatever misguided belief, although, God help her, never to marry a man—when Gillian reaches across the table with her good hand, the left hand, and rests her rough fingers atop the peaks of Caroline’s knuckles.

“I noticed it this morning,” Gillian says.

“Oh.” Just as what’s-her-face in the book eventually realizes that Mr. Darcy is not a complete twat, this comes as a pleasant, life-altering surprise.

“Very second you got out of the Jag. I s-saw from the kitchen window—you looked at your hand in a weird way, and I saw you were wearing the bracelet but not your ring. First thought were maybe you, you misplaced it, or that bloody dog of yours ate it. But you’re not like me, I were always losing my ring—well, I _wanted_ to lose it—but you, you’re always careful with important stuff. So then I thought there were a reason—”

Caroline turns her hand over, offering up the plush, vulnerable underside of her palm to Gillian’s careful, sensual cartography of her lifelines. “You’re the reason,” she blurts—laughs at her eternal damned foolishness, and says, more to herself than Gillian, “Well. That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”

Gillian halts the caress of her hand. Caroline sees her swallowing, the graceful course of muscles slow and honeyed, and she swears she feels Gillian’s heartbeat throbbing through those rough fingertips, etching a new path upon Caroline’s skin as intricate and beautiful as the engravings on the bracelet that circles her wrist.

“Really?”

She squeezes Gillian’s hand. “Don’t you think it’s time?”

Gillian straightens and nearly leaps out of the chair, poised as if for launching into some erotic stratosphere. Frantically, she waves at their server with her good arm.

“We should go,” she says in a strangled tone. 

Which cause Caroline a great deal of amusement. “Where?”

“Home. Anywhere. Now.”

Caroline grins. “I’m not shagging you in that disgusting vehicle. It smells like hay, wet sheep, and curry.”

In anticipation of the check, Gillian grumpily fishes crumpled pound notes out of her pocket. “I know.”

“Besides, your shoulder—”

“Shoulder’s busted, my tongue’s not,” Gillian snaps. 

Caroline’s laugh is so wonderfully long and loud that the couple arguing about Trump’s golf course, the bespectacled perv pretending to read while checking out the server’s arse, the counterman ringing up an elderly couple’s check, and the elderly couple themselves all look over to the two middle-aged English numpties holding hands and cackling uncontrollably—and, not surprisingly, they are all in a collective concordance with Gillian: that they should get a fucking room already, and preferably out of their blessed country.

For the moment they rely on the indifference of the Scottish and settle for a teenage-type make-out session in the Landy, which sits in the semi-secluded car park behind the mill, where Gillian bangs her sling-covered arm on the dashboard—and winces painfully—whilst making a mad, schoolboy-clumsy attempt to pin Caroline against the car door.

She loosens Gillian’s ponytail. The soft hair flays her alive, flows wild through her hand, another secretive river against the crisp autumn background, the greens and the golds—and those eyes again, that she traveled all the way to Scotland to discover the secrets of, the wildwood, the wormwood—

*

It’s their fiftieth and there is wine, so much wine, and food, so much food, and it’s after midnight so officially it’s not their birthday anymore, and she is sitting on the sofa staring at the telly and wondering where the hell everyone is, probably in bed, but Gillian is asleep beside her, snoring in her lap, sighing and stirring and dreaming with her hand clutching the hem of Caroline’s jumper, but someone’s in the kitchen doing dishes, and she allows herself to stroke Gillian’s hair, it’s so fine and soft, hey, it’s innocuous enough, what’s a little hair-stroking between pissed stepsisters anyway, and wouldn’t you know it, the film starting on the telly shows Robert Redford in a blindingly white military uniform, his eyes closed in drunken sleepy rapture and with the fever of an acolyte shiny-browed Barbra Streisand vibrates in his mere presence as she dares to touch his golden hair, and she thinks oh God, I am the lesbian Robert Redford sleepwalking through life, and Gillian nuzzles her thigh and wakes, sits up, and says, hey, look what’s on, her eyes a flickering cool blue gray in the seductive penumbra of the telly, and Gillian’s not looking at the film as the opening credits roll but Caroline, and she brushes Caroline’s bangs away from her forehead, perfectly replaying Streisand’s gentle angel-light touch of Redford’s hair, attuned to the music of prayer, that silent reverence of turning the page in a sacred text, and Caroline thinks, quite profanely, oh fuck, and then something crashes in the kitchen and they hear Raff say oh fuck, and Gillian jumps at the noise and falls off the couch, knee catching a tray of cheese as she goes down and then there’s cheese on the rug, well she didn’t like that Camembert anyway, and Gillian shouts at her son, what the fuck are you doing out there? 

*

In ten heated minutes they run the Olympics of kissing, going for the gold in the slow and deep, the sloppy and fast, the gentle and reverent, the rough and ready. In the distant yet eternally niggling back of her mind Caroline worries that any minute now the tea-shop proprietor is going to appear at the Landy’s window, screaming _get tae fuck, ya sapphic gobshites_ at them.

Gillian shifts, beginning a new course of kisses and nips along Caroline’s throat; her left hand is immobile and tightly clamped in the trap of Caroline’s thighs because while Caroline likes to think she is pretty receptive to a lot of things sexually, under no circumstances will she be fucked in a Land Rover, especially under the dire threat of Scottish intervention, it will cause an international incident, for the sake of peaceful relations between the countries she may have to atone by eating haggis— _there you go, think of haggis, that will calm your tits down_ —

Gillian trails a tongue up her carotid artery, bites her ear. “Say it.”

“Say what?” She assumes Gillian wants to hear _I love you._ She’s said it so often over the years, in flights of insincerity as filler, as comfort when she herself needed it more, over and over and over, an aged rotogravure printing out increasingly faded copies of a brilliant original. At times, she finds it inadequate representation of so many shaded feelings and thoughts.

Particularly when it comes to this woman, who smiles shyly and presses a thumb to Caroline’s lip. “Your litany,” Gillian says. 

She doesn’t remember exactly when she told Gillian about the litany. She recited it, yes, but it was much later when she found the courage to name it aloud. Perhaps it was on a cold night at the farmhouse in the front of the fire; or a balcony in Barcelona; or standing barefoot in her kitchen on a warm spring evening after they celebrated their birthday; or maybe over a pint at their local. Maybe it was all of those places, maybe none of them.

“I’m arrogant, inept, selfish, repressed, and emotionally crippled,” Caroline says.

Gillian’s smile blesses her like a wave. “Yeah. Still perfect.”


	9. my regards to lucky pierre

Who knew there was an authentic French bistro in Huddersfield proper? Not Caroline.

On a late winter’s night—four months after a relationship consummation involving fish and chips on the road, traffic jams courtesy of sheep crossings, rain, and giggling, awkward copulation thwarted by an arm sling and a jealous dog—she finds herself in said bistro with Gillian, enjoying its steamy warmth, rich food, excellent wine, and hipster-sanctioned Edison-bulb lighting.

With impressive precision, the waiter splits the last of the claret evenly between two glasses. He is very handsome and speaks with a charmingly light Parisian accent; even Caroline admits to herself that he is beautiful. Probably because of the perfectly feathered golden hair reminiscent of a 1970s supermodel, like Farrah Fawcett—or like Ruth, she thinks.

Silently she condemns herself: _God, you’re such a lesbian that you’re in love with your dog._

Despite a weakness for pretty, strapping young lads, Gillian remains oblivious to his obsequious hovering. She has paid him little mind the entire evening, except for a slightly exaggerated head nod as they sat down, as if they are rival courtiers crossing the sun-dappled halls of a palace, silently acknowledging their mutual, underappreciated fabulousness in the service of others.

Putting aside all fond thoughts of the doggo, Queen Caroline does indeed appreciate the woman with a tipsy smirk who sits across from her. For one thing, she is terribly grateful that she did not have to mangle the French language this evening; she picked what she wanted off the menu and then asked Gillian to order everything. If this presented an opportunity for her to pat herself on the back for being less of a control freak while appreciating another excellent thing Gillian can do with her tongue, well, so be it.

Contentedly in her cups, Gillian rests her chin on the heel of her hand—the right hand. For the first time in months, she is free of an arm sling, stiches, checkups, and physical therapy appointments; a week ago the doctor gave her the all-clear for fully resuming normal activity, including farm work and, of course, sex. She had made a point of pressing him specifically on point of the latter and, unsatisfied with his blasé and puzzled affirmation, had expounded on the sapphic turn her life had recently taken, and how very, very important hands were in such activities, and—

Blinking slowly, he had mumbled, “Just go easy on the orgies” and gently but firmly guided her out the door.

Thus, Gillian is liberated from the tyranny of left-handed fucking—times during the past four months when forced to pleasure Caroline with her undominant hand because she feared straining or damaging her tender, healing right shoulder. Despite the muscle cramps and obscenity-laced complaints that accompanied the lamented left-handed fucking, postcoital Caroline was always rendered breathless, happily sated, and, much to the annoyance of her lover, ready to tumble into either a nap or a good night’s sleep.

“You’re just like a bloody man,” she recalled hearing Gillian grouse once while nodding off, descending into a dreamland that looked exactly like George Clooney’s villa on Lake Como and— _che sopresa!_ —George Clooney’s wife was there, waiting for her, just for her, with a cannoli on a silver salver.

Now, after a perfect dinner of soup, cassoulet, and chocolate cake, Gillian is in a flirtatious, wine-fueled mood, ready to tease her all the way back home. “So,” she drawls.

“Yes?” Caroline manages the reply without squeaking, because underneath the table Gillian’s foot, liberated from a shoe, brushes slowly against the back of her calf.

She grins lasciviously. “Right hand or left hand?”

Pausing for effect, Caroline savors a mouthful of claret, swallows, and hums. “Inconclusive data.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, really—”

Gillian snorts loudly. “You’re just saying that because you’re left-handed and you think everything done with the left is just grand, just perfect all th’ time.”

“How dare you accuse me, a woman of science, of such irrational bias.”

“Oh hell, here we go.”

Mindful of driving home, and appreciative of the heavy-lidded look of pleasure that comes over Gillian when she inhales the resins of a good red, Caroline expertly pours the remainder of her wine into her companion’s glass. “You cannot possibly expect me to assess and then present an informed conclusion where there exists a very fundamental, categorical flaw in your investigative study.”

The glass hovers in front of Gillian’s face. With the slightest inhalation, she’s transformed into Saint Teresa, pierced not by an angelic spear but a bottle of Bordeaux. “And what,” she purrs, “would that be, Dr. Mackenzie-Bitch-Dawson?”

“Your research question should present three fundamental choices: right hand, left hand, or tongue.”

The retort is well-timed; Gillian chokes and coughs on her wine.

The waiter bounds over, pours more water into a half-empty tumbler, and commits his first faux pas of evening with a woman who is grumpy in perpetuity about being middle-aged: “Are you all right, _madame_?”

“Jesus Christ, mate.” Gillian giggle-hacks loudly. “No worries, you’ll get a good tip, yeah?” 

He does get a good tip—and Gillian gets to drink most of the claret and eat half of the shared chocolate cake, and after dinner Caroline gets so thoroughly snogged that she doesn’t even mind she’s pressed against the winter-scummy flank of the Jag in full view of a surprisingly busy street in Huddersfield when it happens.

Since the fateful drive from Blair Atholl months ago, they have subsisted largely on scraps—moments that never seemed to last long enough nor provide proper sustenance to nourish a nascent relationship: All too brief dinner dates followed by make-out sessions in cars, work schedules, family obligations, physical therapy for Gillian’s healing shoulder, all of it culminating in the unrelenting busyness of the Christmas season. 

Countering the logistical frustrations were the positive reactions from the children. William offered blessings from London; Lawrence shrugged and said _I thought you guys were already sleeping together;_ Calamity resigned herself to both her gran and Auntie Caz bringing a plague of cooties on both houses forever; Flora was merely concerned that her mother’s “terrible” lack of knowledge concerning sheep would prove a detriment to the relationship, and as such constantly brought home library books on sheep for Caroline’s edification; Raff was cheerfully pleased; and Ellie admitted she’d “finally” won a bet among her mates at the store.

After Ellie’s sheepish confession to both of them, Raff had chortled and gently nudged his wife. “Go on, tell them the whole bit.”

“It’s embarrassing,” she protested.

Raff snorted. “Embarassing’s the least of it—you lost forty quid that time!”

“‘That time’?” Gillian echoed.

“Go on—if you don’t tell them, I will.” Raff could hardly contain his mirth. “It’s too good not to.”

Ellie groaned. “All right. So. When you lot were in Barcelona, I bet everyone at work that when you got back, you’d be married.”

“Oh man, the only time she lost more was when she bet that Beano Boris wouldn’t be PM. Always the idealist.” Raff laughed again and grinned affectionately at Ellie. “You really did shoot the moon on th’ Barcelona bet, though.”

“But it would have been _so romantic_ ,” his wife protested, with an accusatory glare at the middle-aged idiots who squandered so grand an opportunity and cost her such a solid chunk of change.

“So.” Caroline folded her arms. “You’ve all had us rumbled for quite some time now.”

“Mum says you guys are really stupid,” Calamity stated quite solemnly, as Ellie violently pinched the bridge of her nose.

That much was true.

As for the parents, Alan seemed befuddled by the turn in their relationship, but whatever vague unease, perhaps bordering on discomfort, that he may have experienced at the outset dissipated quickly when he realized that in terms of romantic companionship, his daughter has done a hell of a lot worse. 

Celia struggled mightily between two oppressive and inaccurate narratives that wearily trod the boards of her aged brain like garbled snatches of Shakespeare dimly recalled by third-rate thespians: Her depraved dyke daughter, so desperate for sex, somehow seduced an ostensibly heterosexual woman into becoming her oh-so-willing paramour; and the equally misogynist one where her slatternly slag of a stepdaughter, having worked her way through the male population of West Yorkshire, set her sights on having all the women as well and decided to start with her stepsister. The only benefit was that any attempt at unraveling these theoretical contradictions and suppositions rendered Celia emotionally exhausted and more susceptible than usual to successful assaults from the younger and more energetic tag team of Calamity and Flora, who, during family gatherings, would dance around singing Bruno Mars songs whenever the old woman would commence banging on about her daughter banging her stepdaughter. Privately, Caroline wondered if Ellie had put the girls up to it and made a note to bankroll Ellie’s next ridiculous bet amongst her coworkers.

Thus Celia was still a bit on the fence, not unlike Ruth, who bristled at the increased domestic intrusions of a human who smelled of both sheepdog and a greater outdoor world denied her; fortunately, the whining and barking of the latter proved immeasurably more tolerable than that of the former. 

The end of January presented an opportunity for a long weekend. Several field trips planned at Caroline’s school meant that all hands would not have to be on deck during the day, and she could partake in a legitimate but brief holiday, her first real break since—well, since she went to Barcelona with Gillian and the kids. It dovetailed nicely with the end of Gillian’s recovery period, so she called in nearly five years’ worth of favors from Greg to take Flora from Friday morning to Monday afternoon.

Day One—Friday—surpassed all Caroline’s nervous expectations. She had prepared a divine, Instagram-worthy charcuterie board that was completely ignored by her guest because the first thing Gillian did upon arrival that afternoon was chase her up the stairs to the bedroom, with the furiously barking Ruth following, the dog so intent on defense of her mistress that she stupidly ignored the charcuterie on the kitchen counter as she vigilantly laid down in front of the bedroom door for the next two hours. Never before in her life has Caroline unreservedly loved such a gorgeously dumb creature.

Bedroom activities aside, it was gratifying to have conversations not interrupted by a child, a crisis, or an 82-year-old woman’s querulous, pathetic forays into cunt-blocking: _Why must you hold hands, you’re not out at the grocery, you needn’t make a statement here,_ Celia would say, while elaborately and loudly pretending to casually sniff at fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table, as if she could legitimately ferret out rot anywhere in the world except her very own soul.

On the drive back to the house from the bistro, the winter sky swirls a chilly mix of blues and violets and grays, daring the eye to parse and name each and every shade. _The violet hour._ Her life has deepened into something else. How many evenings in the past five years has she watched the end of the day and its attendant gradations, waiting for something to change other than the sky, waiting to summon up the courage to make anything happen? Or wondering what Gillian was doing at that very moment, if she also watched the sky, if she felt the same things.

In the hermetic bubble world of the car, the wind thrums around them as she alternates brief, dreamy observation of the sky with fierce attendance to the dictates of the dark, almost empty road. Gillian seems uncommonly quiet; a jarring headlight flash from an oncoming car quickly illuminates her profile—eyes closed, breath steady, mouth hinting at a smile, holding fast to the purity of a moment where she does not have to say or do a blessed thing.

As they hit the last stretch of road before home, Gillian rouses herself from the Jag-imposed meditative state with a happy sigh. Then, with a slight edge to her tone: “Caz.”

Caroline glances at her. “What?”

Gillian squints toward the dusky outline of the house. Even though the woman is in dire need of reading glasses and God help anyone who suggests as much, her distance vision remains as sharp as ever.

“Either you have a very, very large corvid sitting on your outdoor bench,” Gillian enunciates slowly, “or your knobhead ex-husband is there with a bin bag full of his personal effects.”

She pulls into the driveway. From his position perched on the picnic table outside the house, John feebly waves at them. 

A singularly pointed _fuck_ punctuates the happy bubble of the Jag.

She does not recall clearly what happened in immediate aftermath after she exited the calm sanctuary of the car except that she spat, hissed, and shouted at him, all to no avail; after so many years of her furious assaults, he was well accustomed to these surface scuffles and has since developed an oleaginous layer of protection against her rage.

Then she noticed that Gillian was nibbling at her fingernails, shifting her weight from side to side, and bouncing lightly against the side of the car, her body a divining rod of anxiety. So Caroline gave in, telling him he had one night on the couch to get his shit together. 

Ruined, she thought, as she roared into the house—Ruth, sensing the mood, barked uproariously in her wake—dragged out a pillow and blanket from the linen closet, and threw both items at his head. All ruined. She stomped up the stairs, changed into pajamas, brushed her teeth with such fury that her gums bled, and threw the brush in the sink. She glared at herself. The day she married Kate, and the memory thereafter, were forever blighted by her mother’s stupid, unconscionable behavior. And now this weekend, that she and Gillian had so desperately looked forward to, was similarly spoiled by someone else’s mindless selfishness.

In the bedroom she is beyond relieved to find that Gillian has not beat a hasty retreat back to the farm for the familiar, if smothering, comforts of grandchildren and ewes. She sits up in the bed, leaning against the headboard, her lap serving as a support for a thick-as-a-brick omnibus of Daphne du Maurier novels. Even though the book is splayed open, Caroline knows reading is only a pretense here because otherwise the book would be an inch from her face, and this reminds her that soon she and Raff will do battle in rock-paper-scissors over the suicide mission of conversing with Gillian about reading glasses.

As Caroline paces the confines of the bedroom as if it is a prison cell, she recognizes the emotion underlying the baseline of anger: shame. It is her fault that John, forever tethered to her like the albatross around the neck of the ancient mariner, is here. She doesn’t know what the hell to do about it other than pace because she does not deserve the comfort of a warm bed with an amazing woman who has not only the finest ass in West Yorkshire, but also extraordinarily well-developed biceps as a result of several months’ worth of physical therapy.

Pacing is boring and pointless, so she stops. Gillian puts aside the book and stretches, catlike, flexing her bare feet, racing her hands along legs covered in a pleasing green and cream-colored plaid, which complements the light blue t-shirt she wears. How can she pull off that sickening milk of magnesium shade of blue? How did it come to pass that this woman, whom she could not fucking tolerate at first glance, became not only her best friend, but also the best lover she’s ever had? The time loops that have squired her around through so many phases and places have, with great good fortune, landed her here.

“Well.” Gillian playfully slaps her own legs. “Reckon I should’ve brought m’shotgun after all.”

Caroline bursts into much-needed laughter. Weeks ago, she had spotted a beautiful fox not far from the house and, while chatting with Gillian on the mobile, casually mentioned as much. Forty-five minutes later Gillian was at the door with the shotgun, primed for vulpicide. The fox, however, remained elusive and so, with a disturbing amount of eagerness, bloodthirsty Gillian had offered to bring the gun this weekend; despite the weirdly aphrodisiac effect that the weapon had upon her, Caroline suggested that perhaps shotguns were not ideal accoutrements for romantic weekends. 

Pleased at breaking the mood, Gillian grins and pats the mattress. “C’mere.”

Gingerly Caroline sits on the edge of the bed. With an exaggerated groan Gillian leans forward, tugs at the sleeve of her pajama top, and reels her in. 

As she settles between Gillian’s legs and welcomes the strong arms that wrap around her, she thinks of old trees falling in forests sublime with silence. If an old head teacher falls in an old house, would anyone hear it?

With her head on Gillian’s chest, she struggles to locate a reassuring heartbeat but only hears the sad exhalations of her own breathing. “I’m sorry,” she says. 

“Not your fault. You’re not the knobhead showing up uninvited at his ex’s gaff on a Friday night.”

“I really want to—”

“Hmm?”

“—do all the things we did this afternoon because I need more, um—data for your study.”

“I know.” Gillian hums and the reverberation swells through her bones, a soundwave that crests against Caroline’s cheek.

The lullaby of the tipsy tired shepherdess sends her yawning into the blue sky t-shirt. “You’re _really_ comfortable.”

“Winter weight. Be gone by spring.” Gillian strokes her hair. Then adds nervously, jokingly: “So you, you’ll hate me by the summer.”

Caroline smiles. “Not a fucking chance, mate.”

She falls asleep.

When she wakes the next morning. she is sprawled on her back. She smells coffee, thinks Gillian must be awake, but instead discovers her lover curled and pressed next to her in a near-perfect golden mean position. Like a monk in prayerful contemplation of a sand mandala, Caroline would have spent several minutes touching and traveling through that form in her mind before gently disrupting its perfection. Instead, she must slip away and confront the dismal vicissitudes of the day.

On the stairs, she narrowly misses tripping on a multicolored stuffed iguana, a new favorite toy for both Flora and Ruth; they played fetch with it. The iguana was acquired through a Secret Santa gift exchange at the school last month. During the staff Christmas party, Sid the hippie-ish art teacher, who confessed he was responsible for the gift, told Caroline that iguanas symbolized contentment. _The iguana tells you to go with the flow,_ he had said.

 _Well fuck that._ Caroline’s slippered foot boots the iguana down the remainder of the stairs, where it plops into the living room, where apparently it catches John’s eye and heralds her arrival: “Hey ho!” he shouts from the kitchen.

So last night was indeed _not_ a strange nightmare and he is, unfortunately, still present in her home. Having made coffee, John offers to prepare breakfast as well and, like the worst fucking concierge ever, inquires as to whether Gillian’s sleep was at all troubled by Caroline’s snoring as his was during the tenure of their marriage.

Her fist curls around the plunger of the French press and, as she ecstatically envisions it squashing his head rather than coffee grounds, he relays a detailed tale of woe that she was too livid to digest last night. Even now, as she winces in recognition at the painfully familiar beats and stresses of that pedantic intonation, all she can think about is what to make Gillian for breakfast: French toast or omelet?

“Look, I know you don’t care,” he begins.

Sweet or savory?

“You’ve made that abundantly clear. But you have no idea what I’ve been through the past few months.”

The French toast would, in name only, keep in with the quasi-French theme of the weekend. But Lord, she thinks, that woman does appreciate a good omelet.

“First, you drove me away from here, what with arranging those daily visits from Celia—very clever of you, I must admit, but you have caused me to be cast about on homeless seas, unwanted, searching for a crumb of kindness—”

Caroline wrinkles her nose. “Aren’t you mixing your metaphors?”

“I even attempted flinging myself—platonically, of course—on the plaid-breasted mercy of your uncouth lover upstairs, but couldn’t get past those snarling contemptuous dragons at the door—”

“You mean Raff and Ellie?”

“He is _very big_ now and frankly I’ve always found her a little frightening too. You can never trust a quiet woman. Well. I thought I was saved when our son allowed me to stay with him and his weirdly bearded goonish companion at their new flat, then he said I was ‘cramping their style’—style, they wouldn’t know style if Oscar Wilde rose from the dead and pissed on them!”

He then rants unabated about a former student studying abroad who had offered his flat free of charge for a couple months until John could find his bearings—never mind that John could no more find his bearings than he could locate both balls with both hands—but he had accepted the offer, and the student recently returned home to find all his plants dead (“I warned Stephen I did not possess a green thumb”), his cat missing (“The feline was a roustabout”), and John passed out on the couch (“I should never have tried that absinthe”). And thus, once again homeless, the bad penny has bounced back to the woman who divorced the penny about seven years ago and who thinks pennies should be banned from all world currencies anyway.

He pleads penury, but she knows that he has received a handsome palimony-style payout from Judith, who continues to text Caroline minutiae of her everyday life on a distressingly frequent level. That a man with the funds and the freedom to do most anything he desired could continue to scrape around in the same shallow grave he dug for himself years ago remains mystifying.

“Caroline?”

“Hmm?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, I thought I’d go a little crazy and make French toast _and_ an omelet. I think she’d really like that.”

John gapes, his jaw twitches, and he goes into weary condescension mode, as if she were an undergraduate who didn’t know who Samuel Johnson was. “No, I mean, about me staying here.”

She frowns, picks up her iPad from the kitchen table, and thrusts it at him. “Start looking for flats on Airbnb.”

“Flats? On Airbnb? I might as well look for a serial killer on Craigslist!”

“Well,” Caroline replies absently, “we could do that too.” 

“For Christ’s sake!”

“Why don’t you take your coffee and go outside? It’s nice out.” Replace _coffee_ with _stuffed iguana_ and she’d be talking to Flora, except that Flora is lovely and reasonable and perfect and doesn’t have either perpetual five o’clock shadow or the gumption of a parasite. 

John retaliates with logic: “You haven’t been outside.”

“It’s unseasonably warm. I feel a touch of climate catastrophe in the air. Springtime and death, all rolled into one.”

“Like a Stravinsky piece,” he murmurs. “Beauty and chaos, foreboding—”

“—and lions and tigers and bears, oh my, now get the fuck out of my kitchen.”

Sighing melodramatically, he takes the iPad and a cup of coffee outside.

She leans against the counter, sips the coffee. He always made a decent brew, but she actively fears that actual enjoyment of it will leave her unguarded for detecting the symptoms of his particular brand of needling, relentless poison.

Ruth pads over and sits attentively at Caroline’s feet. Having intermittently summoned the ghost of her dead wife for several years, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to occasionally hear a dog talking to her as if Ruth were an Elizabethan lady-in-waiting. 

_Mistress mine, allow me to do your bidding._

Caroline sighs.

_Usurpers run rampant among our homestead. Pray, grant me leave to rouse the sheep herder out of your bed._

“You would pick the easy one,” Caroline says accusingly.

_Fair lady, you wound me. The larger one smells of crème de menthe and subpar deodorant, it muddies my senses terribly. Need I remind you I am not a beast of the fields._

“Yeah, he used to be better about grooming, and I don’t know where he got the crème de menthe, must’ve brought it with him because I hate the stuff—”

Ruth’s tail thumped impatiently. _Prithee, madame, I urge you to focus on the matter at hand!_

“Oh, all right. I guess I have to give you something to do.” Caroline flings her arm in the direction of the staircase. “Go on, she hates sleeping in late anyway.”

 _Madame! I remain your faithful servant._ Ruth dashes up the stairs.

With a guilty wince Caroline resigns herself to the inevitable: the sounds of Ruth’s toenails on the bedroom floor above, a thump indicating that Gillian either jumped or fell out of bed, and roar of outrage: “Caz, this f-f-fucking dog!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Caroline bellows contritely. She tries to focus on the source of all discord, parked outside on her picnic bench. Breakfast would have to wait. _The sooner you get rid of him—_

She doesn’t need to finish the thought. She grabs an old, thick jumper from the coat rack, wraps herself up in it, and goes outside. It is, however, surprisingly warm; while the sun has not yet burned away the morning mist, it hints at a pleasant day to come. Aside from the dual doom of climate catastrophe and ex-husband, she would otherwise enjoy the beauty of the morning.

“Oh good, you’re here,” he says. Dutifully, he has been scrolling through the Airbnb app. He shows her photos of a pleasant cottage outside Ripponden—affordable, quiet, lovely, perfect for a writer pretending to write. “I mean, it’s nice. Only one major problem.” He points accusingly at a photo of the guest bath. “Look at this _heinous_ wallpaper.”

Inwardly, Caroline cringes. No one wants to shit while looking at pink seashells, but she rallies: “Spare bath. I doubt you’ll be spending much time in there.”

“And the—there’s no oven, it’s just a stovetop range—”

“You planning elaborate dinner parties or something?”

“Well, no, but I thought about inviting you over for dinner as a thank you for letting me stay here.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no?’”

“I mean thanks, no thanks, I’m good.”

“Look, I’m sorry I disrupted your weekend. I don’t know how many times I can apologize for it. I didn’t know this, this”—John glares apprehensively at the house— _“thing_ was still going on with you two. I thought Lawrence was _joking_ or _high_ when he told me.”

Caroline rubs her forehead.

“I mean, Gillian is a lovely, wonderful, kind, supportive person, but what on earth could _you_ possibly have in common, with, well—” In the face of a particularly withering glare, he falters.

“No, go on. Tell me.” _Give me an excuse to fling hot coffee in your face._

“Caroline, you know you’re not—I mean, you’re really, you know, cerebral, in fact, you’re one of the most intelligent women I’ve ever _met_ , and Gillian is well, all instinct and nerve—”

“Are you saying” Caroline replies slowly, “that’s she’s stupid?”

He stares at her left hand, which flexes dangerously around the coffee cup.

“What? No, no, she’s not stupid, I mean, she’s not, you know, _well educated_ , but—”

The sound of the back door indicates they are no longer alone.

Gillian stands in doorway rubbing her neck, hair tousled, still in sleepwear.

“Well, well, well!” John booms with ridiculous bonhomie. “There she is! Sleeping in late, I see. ‘How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot!’”

Gillian stares at him, turns, and walks back into the house.

John sighs. “She always did have a tin ear.”

Caroline rises.

“Go on, go ahead, go placate your lover.”

“Fuck off and pick someplace to land,” she snaps. 

In the kitchen Gillian leans against the kitchen counter clutching a coffee cup—Caroline’s favorite Oxford mug and fine, it’s fine, one must make these sacrifices for love—while engaged in a fierce stare-down with Ruth, who nervously wags her tail when Caroline enters.

“Still here.” Gillian rests the lip of the mug against her own.

Caroline raises both hands defensively. “I know, I know. I just have to convince him that wallpaper in a bathroom is acceptable.”

Suspicious, Gillian’s eyes narrow. “You hate bathroom wallpaper.”

“Sometimes the abstract ideals of one’s principles must be sacrificed for the greater good.” 

“Your mobile made a noise.” Gillian nods at the phone on the kitchen table.

“Who was it? Did you check?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, who—”

“It were your secret girlfriend, who asked if your ex-husband and the pillock you’re shagging are still hanging about and if so, when can she come over?”

With a mock stern look, Caroline scoops up the mobile. Given the way the day has started, she expects a text informing her that the school has burned to the ground. Instead, it’s a cheap shot from Celia: ENJOY YOUR MUCKY WEEKEND.

Sad that she uses all caps to convey sarcasm, Caroline thinks. She tosses the mobile back on the table. Amateur.

Surprised at Caroline’s abuse of a relatively new iPhone, Gillian asks worryingly, “What is it?”

“My mother being an arsehole.”

“Oh.” Gillian shakes her head. “No escaping it,” she says softly.

“Escaping what?”

“Everything.”

In the face of harsh reality, Caroline feels the urge for busy work and washes her coffee cup with ferocious focus. “She said—my mother—she said, ‘enjoy your mucky weekend.’ Which, I guess, yeah, if you look at it that way, on the surface, that’s what it is, that’s how someone like her would see it.” She sits the cup in the dishrack, dries her hands. Water swirls down the sink, the frothy expanse of soap suds a clinging constellation along the stainless-steel universe. “But it’s not like that. I wanted this weekend to be special, like, like—”

Under the palpable heat of Gillian’s gaze, she keeps staring into the sink, but then admits it, albeit in the softest of mutterings.

“—like a honeymoon.”

She never had a honeymoon with Kate. She barely remembers the honeymoon with John, save that she was happy to keep pace with his prodigious alcohol consumption because the expectation of this particular marital ritual was fucking like a porn star to please him; in that respect a cheap bottle of vodka was the best acting coach she’d ever had. She thinks of Gillian returning from Majorca, gorgeously tanned, quietly miserable, and drunkenly admitting that the only time she was happy on her honeymoon was when she was alone in the sun-spangled vastness of the sea.

The response of a nervous guffaw or a bad joke is fully expected because the slightest mention of anything having to do with marriage or commitment typically sends Gillian into an emotional tizzy similar to the colorful but unpredictable kinetic motion of a child’s spinning top. But when Gillian’s hand sears the back of her neck, followed by a wet kiss on her cheek and repeated nips to her earlobe and throat, Caroline realizes that this emotional state had a past-expiration date of which she was entirely unaware.

Kissing and groping, they pinball around the kitchen—50 points for bumping but not spilling the French press, additional 50 for sending an “I Love West Yorkshire” magnet skittering off the fridge, 100 points for kicking Ruth’s food bowl, 100 points for colliding into the table and sending the iPhone clattering to the floor, careening back around again to the counter with Gillian pressed against it and her hand plunging into the green-cream pajama pants, 500 points, fingertips brushing against Gillian’s bare hipbone, hot damn, 1,000 points, Gillian’s hand under her pajama top coveting her breast, a gazillion points, and everything about to go full tilt when Ruth barks wearily— _madame, I beg of you, this continued enervation of my soul must cease, surely you are aware the human resembling a crumpled menthol cigarette remains on the premises!_

Caroline regains control. Reluctantly, she pulls away and catches her breath, grateful that John still sits outside, pointed toward the pastoral view facing away from the house.

“Jesus,” Gillian too gulps for air, while gripping the counter for support. “You’ve _got_ to get rid of him.”

“Yeah. I know.” She risks anchoring her hands to Gillian’s slender hips and Gillian leans heavily into the touch, resting her head against Caroline’s sternum.

Why does she think of the iguana? _I’m not a hippie!_ But there it is, a brightly colored talisman tossed at her feet as her brain recklessly speeds through another intersection in time. 

“I think I know what to do.”

“What?” The question is mumbled into Caroline’s breasts, as Gillian’s hands make a sneakily slow ascent toward them.

Lightly Caroline smacks away those hands. “I’ve got to go with the iguana.”

Suspicious, Gillian slowly raises her head. “Oh shit, no—are you havin’ a stroke? No, wait, wait, smile for me, they say that’s one way of telling—”

“I’m _not_ having a stroke. What I mean is, I’ve got to go with the flow, follow my inspiration, my contentment.” Caroline kisses her quickly. “So I’m taking a page from your playbook.”

“My—what?”

“Playbook.” Caroline straightens her pajama top, finger-combs her hair, and thanks God that the bulky jumper camouflages her ridiculously stiff nipples. 

“Iguanas, playbooks—” Gillian claps a hand on her forehead. “Jesus Christ, what are you on about?”

“Think about what you want for breakfast, other than me.”

“Caz—”

Caroline spins and marches toward the door. 

“ _I don’t have a playbook_ ,” Gillian calls at her retreating back.

Outside, John still scrolls restlessly through Airbnb. “Disappointing,” he mutters at her. “I found a place that was perfect—except that it’s like five minutes from your mother and Alan.”

Caroline sits. “All right, I didn’t want to have to tell you this, but you’ve got to go.”

“Oh come on,” he moans in exasperation. “Surely you two will have plenty of time later for—whatever it is you get up to in bed, I shudder to think.”

“You can shudder all you like but I had three orgasms yesterday, four if you count the chocolate cake, and if memory serves that far surpasses any of your quotidian efforts in that department. That said, thanks for coffee, let’s get you sorted and ready to leave, shall we?”

He slouches rebelliously. “Where’s the fire?” 

“Judith is coming over.”

Unsurprisingly, the mere mention of the name prompts a wince of distaste. “Judith?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because we have things to discuss.”

“What things?”

“Just—things.”

Groaning dramatically, John puts down the iPad. “You’re not going to tell me that all of a sudden you’re interested in Judith in any sort of fashion. And as for her, well, this, this _crush_ she has on you is just—absolutely ludicrous. She’s not _gay,_ not really. She’s just acting like this to get back at me.”

Caroline folds her arms. “Just like I’m not really gay, and Gillian’s not really bisexual—”

“Gillian,” John enunciates haughtily, “is an enigma wrapped in coarse flannel and perpetually shrouded in a fog of Jägermeister. If you told me she were smitten with one of her sheep, well, I wouldn’t be surprised one bit.”

Admittedly, the man still had a way with words. And given the way Gillian still goes on about how much she misses Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren, one is led to wonder sometimes.

But now it’s game on. “Well, Gillian happens to think Judith is grand,” Caroline begins, “so she’s coming is coming over so we can—”

His black eyes glitter with suspicion.

“I don’t really want to tell you this.”

John snorts derisively. “What? Is she going to write a book about you two? Like she wanted to write one about Celia and Alan. It’ll never come to pass.”

“Gee, which one of you is the famous bestselling author again?”

“I’m just saying she doesn’t always finish what she starts.”

“Point taken, but no, that’s not what we’re talking about.”

He gives her a bored look. “Then what?”

“It’s still in negotiations.”

He sighs again. “What?”

“We’re going to talk about having a threesome.”

He laughs.

She maintains the poker face. If he calls the bluff—if he insists on speaking to Judith directly—Caroline is confident that a woman who is a professional storyteller and unrepentant alcoholic bullshit artist would gleefully rise to the occasion and immerse herself into the scenario. The only problem, however, would be removing her from it. The last time Caroline spoke with her, it was with the intent of imparting the very important announcement that Caroline was now romantically involved with someone who owned a shotgun.

It did not prove a deterrent. _Ooh, rough trade! I like it,_ Judith had purred.

Once he is finished laughing, John snorts. “Nonsense,” he says.

“Is it?” A calm retort always unnerves him.

“Am I really supposed to believe this? You wouldn’t.”

“I don’t think you know anymore what I would and wouldn’t do.”

Cocksure, he repeats it: “You wouldn’t.”

Nonchalant, she shrugs, picks up his coffee mug, and finishes the last of his brew.

“You would never do something like that in a million years—a threesome!” he scoffs loudly.

“Believe what you want to believe. But you see, you don’t understand. Well, you don’t understand me anymore.”

“Don’t understand what?” John squints.

“It’s not the first time I’ve done it,” she retorts softly. She smiles.

Intimate knowledge of someone you’ve loved over a period of several decades furnishes a certain level of expertise in the subject matter, so to speak, as if they are a book series you’ve read so many times that tangles of plot in forthcoming installments can be seen a mile away. Seemingly elaborate mental chess moves are telegraphed with expressions and gestures and phrases and patterns that play out at the level of a checkers game with a blind monkey. But the exchange of knowledge is mutual, and you are also the book that is read.

Last night John correctly sailed through the chapter where he encountered the very familiar storm of his ex-wife’s fury, and correctly navigated a very British north star to the majestic isle that is Caroline’s staid sense of propriety and protectiveness. But now his reading of the only woman he’s ever truly loved brings forth sour, unwanted revelation, a twist ending to the Book of Caroline. The truth underneath the bluff unmoors him from all that he has believed about her.

As if thrown over into a wintertime sea, he grows pale with the cold shock of the revelation. All those years, in all that time, her desire remains unseen, a mystery to him. “You did.”

“Yes.”

“When?” he demands. “With who?”

The memory is too prized to share. “You know I’m not going to tell you any of that.”

“Why?”

“Do you mean why I’m not going to tell you or why I did it?”

“God _damn_ it, Caroline—”

“I did it because I wanted two people at one time. Because I wanted—I _needed—_ to feel desire and be desired, to be with someone who would take care of my needs for once. After all those years with you, I had forgotten what that was like.”

As he takes it in, she hopes this nail in the coffin of their relationship is the final one.

She toys with the empty coffee mug. “For Christ’s sake. Haven’t you had enough already?”

Having learned from Olga the practicality of certain apps, Caroline summons an Uber for him while he stalks inside to retrieve his belongings. Twenty minutes of awkward silence are interleaved with the safe ground of stilted conversation about their sons because despite everything, they both remain British to the very core.

Finally, a Prius hatchback lumbers into view.

“Well.” Stiffly he rises from the bench, slings the sack of his belongings over a shoulder, and snarls out his farewells: “Enjoy your _romantic_ weekend. And do give my regards to Lucky Pierre.”

Caroline assumes he refers to Judith; was it some sort of derisive nickname he had for her? She hasn’t the faintest idea, but curiosity does not overwhelm the need to have him gone, so she does not pursue it. As the hatchback slowly disappears down the lane, she takes a several solitary minutes to enjoy the quiet, sunny morning, and a deep, satisfying sense of resolution and lightness.

She goes into the house. Gillian is not in the kitchen, and Caroline wonders if she’s gone back to bed when she hears a faint whimpering noise that Ruth sometimes makes while sleeping; the noise worries Flora so that the girl will sometimes sit in a cross-legged vigil near Ruth as she wheezes away in sleep, ready to whisk the golden beast away to the vet at the first sign of obvious distress. 

In the living room she finds Ruth sleeping on the sofa—more specifically, atop Gillian, who is wide awake and glaring helplessly at the ceiling.

“Look at you two!” Caroline exclaims. “Friends at last!” She smiles down at them. This, she thinks, is the only threesome she’s interested in these days. 

Gillian shakes her head. “This f-f-fucking dog,” she says.


	10. incendiary blue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flashback chapter, which picks up at the end of Chapter 5.
> 
> [Soundtrack for chapter](https://youtu.be/tkOr12AQpnU)

In the hotel bar, Caroline is almost face down on beautiful, polished mahogany—almost, save that her head is pillowed on a forearm—and Gillian would otherwise savor the oddly gratifying sight of the snotty bitch laid low by boozy excess save that the bartender is serving them looks. Also, she worries that if Caroline suddenly drops dead or ends up in hospital, she will somehow be blamed for it because that’s the way it always fucking goes—she breathes, she’s blamed. It’s not like she glued a champagne flute into Caroline’s hand or magically summoned a beautiful woman to bewitch everyone’s perfect, favorite mother and daughter.

Listen to you, she chastises herself. But Gillian’s hand twitches with the urge to touch. As it has from the very day they met.

Scowling, she swallows nervously and glances at the cocktail menu on the bar. She likes the typeface with its understated elegance and the pleasingly posh, textured thickness of the paper stock. Even as she wonders why nomenclature of the cocktails was entrusted to someone who was a Monkees fan: Calder Valley Sunday—vodka, tequila, blood orange juice, grenadine syrup; Last Train to Wetwang—gin, bitters, rosemary, elderflower liqueur; Swaledale Believer—a white Russian with a shot of espresso; I’m Not Your Cladding Stone—vodka, chartreuse, dry vermouth, crème de menthe.

She mentions to Reverend Randy that the menu looks like what she’d want for a wedding invite and as she says this, she smiles because the delicious slide into storytelling, into another world, soothes her; it’s more invigorating than good whiskey or a satisfying shag. She is someone else. It’s always good to be someone else. Tonight, she is the woman who is going to marry Caroline Elliot _nee_ Dawson, they will honeymoon in the Swiss—or was it French?—hotel where they first met, where they will ski, they will drink hot chocolate, they will make love in a hotel room bright with reflected moonlight. Tonight, she will allow herself to push aside Caroline’s hair and gently massage her neck—as she does right now, and as if she’s done it a hundred times before, like when they sit on a couch after dinner watching telly while exchanging the lovingly banal tokens of coupledom, like _how was your day?_ She has thought about this countless times this day alone, because Caroline has a strong neck like an ancient bronze of Athena and a cleft chin like a movie star and Gillian wants to cup that neck, press her thumb into that cleft and she wants to smell Caroline’s hair again, like she did the first time they hugged and she lost herself in it, inhaling the very specific emotion of genuine affection from the simmering, messy melting pot of feelings she usually had about her stepsister. 

Reverend Randy has decided that the menu should be Gillian's keepsake, something she can take to a printer as an example of a wedding invite. He taps the fine, thick paper with a finger and smiles at the baby-faced bartender. “Can we keep this one, son? You won’t get in any trouble?”

The lad offers a bevy of passive-aggressive reactions for them to choose from: frowning, nodding, shrugging.

Randy flips the menu over and pulls out a pen. “So, what would you like to put on your wedding announcement?”

“Oh!” Gillian perks up at the invitation to an invitation, another layer to her fantastic story. “Um. How about—how about a quote? ‘Marriage is a fine institution, but who wants to be in an institution?’”

“Good start!”

They are drowning in laughter at the faux invitation Randy has sketched out when Caroline stirs, sits up ramrod straight, and tugs fussily at her blazer.

“And—she’s back!” Randy proclaims. “How’re you feeling, Miss Caroline?”

Caroline’s fiercely electric blue gaze chills them, as if they are students on the first day of the semester and she’s about to start a lecture that will profoundly alter their lives, they are merely the audience awaiting the gift of her deep abiding knowledge in this, the original cast production of _The Prime of Miss Bitch Dawson._

So they wait.

“Time,” Caroline finally intones, “is a meaningless construct.”

A giddy smile wrecks the blasé expression of Gillian’s face. Caroline, the pretentious and ploddingly perfect snotty bitch, hath indeed returned, albeit drunkenly upgraded for maximum amusement. The moment is the silk inlaid on a charming old box you find in a second-hand shop; the luxury of the unexpected reveal seems almost greater than whatever else may be in the box.

“Gettin’ in the weeds now,” Randy murmurs.

Ever-agreeable Gillian nods. “Too right.” Even as she thinks, _talk to me some more about time and constructs and what have you, you mad bitch._

“But!” Caroline barks.

They hush.

“Time also marks us in a very real, literal, physical way. As epochs have marked the strata of the mountains and carved out the dales before us. Sagging tits, stretch marks, wrinkles, age spots—the dregs of life lie before me, there is nothing left to expect from it but encroaching cronedom.”

Randy blinks.

“Bloody hell, Caz. You sound like John,” Gillian observes.

Caroline’s face crumples into despair. “Fuck!” 

“There, now,” Gillian consoles, gently claps her stepsister’s padded shoulder.

“Who’s John?” Randy asks innocently.

“Ex-husband.”

“Oh, dear.” 

“Gillian!” Caroline says sharply.

“What?”

Caroline reaches for her face and for one giddy, bright moment Gillian anticipates a loving caress.

Instead, Caroline tries to pull apart her lips, all while peering at Gillian’s mouth with lurid scientific interest. “You have _awfully_ straight teeth.”

Then she reels back, laughing, grinning at Randy. “D’ya know why I’m marrying this one?” Caroline jabs a finger at Gillian and narrowly misses poking her in the tit. “Her teeth are perfect. Never buy the brood mare without checking the teeth, you know.”

“Goodness, Caroline,” Randy drawls, “you’re gonna be paying for that observation later, I can tell you that right now.”

Simpering, Caroline squeezes Gillian’s bicep, caresses it, and the brood mare forgets everything while wallowing in drunken objectification. “Just kidding, my goddess of the valley.” 

“That’s, b-better,” Gillian says, while kicking herself mentally for finding this ludicrous comment insanely sexy. “Sounds, um, a bit like a salad dressing though.” 

“You,” Caroline intones sensuously, “are the vinaigrette on the _mmm-_ mesclun greens of my life.”

In her day, Gillian has fallen for a lot of lines; this is, hands down, the weirdest one yet. She attempts camouflage of a swoon by bracing a hand against the bar and planting a fist at her waist, hoping this jaunty pose conveys a confident _yes, I know_ or at least _I’m pretending I’m on a yacht._

Randy chortles. “What were y’all drinking again? Thinking maybe I should have some.”

“Veuve Cliquot, the widow sourpuss, the bitch who looks like my mother.” Caroline looks at Randy’s scribbled wedding invite. Imperious, she points at Randy, as if he is a student caught cheating on an exam. “ _Randy._ What—is—that?”

In a duet of denial gone wrong, Randy says “oh” and Gillian mumbles “nothing.”

Caroline picks up the menu and scans the hastily written wedding invitation draft. Gillian notices the beauty of her hand, the graceful twitch of her eyebrow, like the surprised leap of a gazelle in a forest—oh God, Gillian thinks, _I have gone so far round the bend about this woman my head is up my arse—is this how John ended up being such a twat? He just couldn’t come up with any more decent words or thoughts to describe this incredible woman so his writing started coming out his arse and he were ruined._

“Fine.” Caroline slams the menu-invitation on the bar, hand splayed protectively across it, as if she will snatch it back at a second thought. “What I want to know is—”

Again, they wait.

“How’d you fuckers know my middle name?”

Relieved, Randy laughs and Gillian appreciates her companion’s exquisite deadpan capability.

“Caroline, you are a pistol!”

“Americans like firearms, so I assume this is a compliment.”

“Indeed, ma’am. Indeed it is.” Randy shakes his head. “Why, if we had a marriage license at the ready I’d hitch you myself, but my wife and I are gonna be wanderin’ around the Lake District when your ceremony happens.”

“Fine, marry us now,” Caroline declares, but looks at Gillian bewilderingly as if her faux bride is an afterthought: _Who am I marrying?_ _Oh well, the brood mare will do._ “First, I think we need more champagne.” Caroline digs through her purse for a credit card that has seen more use today than it has in the past month. She waves it at the bartender. “Frodo, hit us up with a round of champagne. Veuve Cliquot, of course.”

Gillian panics. “Just a rehearsal, right?” She gives Randy a stricken look. “It, it’s not r-real?”

“Well!” Caroline trills with faux outrage. “ _Someone_ has cold feet.”

“Fine, let’s f-fucking do it!” Gillian retorts defiantly.

“All righty, then. Just a bit of a run-through.” Randy clears his throat. “Marriage—” he intones somberly.

“—ruined my mind and my body, I wasted the best years of my life on that sodden prick.” Blinking apologetically, Caroline wavers in her seat. “Guess I wasn’t supposed to say that bit out loud.”

“Maybe we should just move along—” Gillian mumbles.

“Sure thing, ladies.” Randy reads from the invite: “Do you, Caroline ‘Head Bitch’ Dawson Elliot Kennedy Onassis, take Gillian Rio Le Bon Greenwood as your lawfully wedded wife?”

Caroline contemplates it, then consents conditionally: “Only if she gets rid of all those atrocious flowered blouses that look like they’ve been beaten on a rock five hundred times.”

“Piss off!” Gillian barks.

“Takin’ that as a _yes.”_ Randy breezes along. “And do you, Gillian, take Caroline as your lawfully wedded wife?”

“Only if she removes the champagne cork stuck up her posh bitch arse.”

Randy sighs. “This is truly a match made in heaven. By the power invested in me by God All Mighty, I hereby declare you wife and wife. You may kiss the—”

Waving off the kiss with a flick of the wrist, Caroline downs a flute of champagne. 

“Maybe later,” Gillian says apologetically. 

Still chuckling, Randy shoves the invite-bar menu at Gillian. “Ladies, this has been interesting, but must leave you. I have got to go see about our cab. We’re going out for dinner.”

“Sounds grand,” Gillian says—and notices that Caroline, pouting over an empty glass, is eyeballing Gillian’s half-consumed flute. “And I, uh, think I need to take my once and future wife on a walk to sober up.”

“Good luck.” Randy grins wryly. “Perhaps we’ll run into each other later?”

“Aye.”

“If not, y’all have a good night.” A glance at his mobile, though, dissolves his smile and hurriedly he rushes away toward the lobby.

Caroline makes a greedy lunge for Gillian’s neglected drink, but Gillian easily slides it out of her reach. “All right, you. We’re going for a stroll.”

“A stroll? Caroline sneers. “Every footfall would take us further from God and alcohol.”

“Yeah, that’s the plan, Batman. Look, you need to get your head on straight before you talk to Lucia so you can be all, you know, charming and Oxfordy and posh bitchy an’ all that good stuff, eh? All right? Fresh air will sober you up.” Gillian extends a hand. “Come on, let’s go.” 

Scowling and tipsily regal, Caroline slides off the barstool, takes a moment to sway and orient herself on precarious high heels, and takes Gillian’s hand as a silk-gloved countess would the grimy paw of a coachman. But petulant Caroline is still obedient Caroline; as one admires Darth Vader on a purely theoretical level, so Gillian begrudgingly grants her tiny evil stepmother a sliver of nauseous respect for so ruthlessly crushing someone’s spirit.

Still, as they navigate through the hotel to the courtyard and the garden outside, Gillian is quietly delighted that Caroline’s hand remains in hers and tells herself that it’s out of choice rather than her gorgeously tottering drunken arse requiring physical support.

The courtyard leads to an unassuming but pretty parterre garden, where evening settles darkened petticoats around the crocuses and cyclamen. There aren’t any people about except a small group in the courtyard sharing fags and small talk. Blue lights wreathed in shrubs burn steady as stars near the courtyard doorway and Gillian is acutely aware that she sweats, she always sweats when she drinks too much, and the warmth of Caroline’s hand in her own makes her perspire even more. And either the flowers or Caroline’s perfume or both wreak sensory havoc upon her, everything swirls in a rich scent of night, a deep indescribable blue. Gillian remembers reading about how some people can smell, taste, or even hear colors; she thinks people possessing this gift extremely lucky, almost blessed, really, to enjoy the world on a multivalent level, with one’s senses colliding so ceaselessly in a beautiful commotion. She envies it so that at times she’s tried to convince herself that she too has this condition; one time sitting in the barn, eyes closed, she tried to convince herself that sheep shit really does smell brown.

She glances back at the blue lights near the French doors, the color achingly bright and incendiary. They wander deeper into the garden; Caroline’s gait seems steadier. The night smells blue, Caroline smells blue, would the night air taste blue? She opens her mouth and breathes in. Nothing? Something? All she knows, all she feels is blue, everything is blue and burning into clarity.

Gillian celebrates this imaginary synesthesia with New Order, singing softly: “‘Every time I think of you, I feel shot right through with a bolt of blue—’” She trails off, the lyrics lost among the clamoring of her senses, racketing her spine as if it were a sapling caught in a whirlwind. She shivers.

Unpredictable as a stubborn ewe, Caroline abruptly stops walking and Gillian, still tethered to her arm, is yanked backward, tripping and almost colliding into the posh, scented softness of Caroline’s chest. Her hands fall to rest against Caroline’s shoulders.

Caroline giggles and Gillian, who loves this infectious girlish laugh, joins in. “You forgot the lyrics, didn’t you?” she wheezes, and pulls Gillian closer.

“What? No.”

“Liar, you forgot. Miss ‘I Know All the Fucking 80s Songs’ forgot the lyrics.”

“Never said that, that I know _all_ the songs.”

Caroline giggles more and somehow manages to make déclassé snorting sound haughty and highbrow. “Oh, sure, you jus’ don’t remember one of the _best songs ever_.”

Despite its essential worthlessness, her minor feats of memory, the possession of this mental stockpile of old songs and movies, has always been a point of pride for Gillian. This evening, however, her pop culture backlog proved useful in crafting their romantic backstory. Gillian has never gone to this much trouble to bag a bloke; most of the time all she’d have to do was tell them she’d been Emma Watson’s nanny or that she dated both Liam and Noel Gallagher at the same time and the whiff of minor celebrity shrouded her with an irresistibly slaggy sex appeal. And as for Caroline’s own pathetically inept husband, John had been momentarily impressed with her when she correctly recalled who directed _Anatomy of a Murder_ when he couldn’t. Men, it seemed, were easily sated and fooled with scraps of minutiae and half-hearted lies; women needed the narrative drive and detail of stories with a touch of truth.

Or maybe in creating the story she colored it with her own wishful thinking and blunderingly authored it into existence: She’s face-to-face and alone with Caroline in a damnably romantic setting, with Caroline’s hands pressed together in the small of her back, a delicate knot of knuckles nudging her spine.

Fierce thought scrunches up Gillian’s face; in her mind, the lyrics tantalize like a mirage. “Okay, let me try again.” She takes a breath. “‘Every time I think of you I get shot right through with a bolt of blue….It’s … no problem—'”

It doesn’t come. Frustrated, she groans.

To her immense surprise, Caroline finishes the couplet—and pitch perfect, no less: “‘It’s no problem of mine but it’s a problem I find, living a life that I can’t leave behind.’”

Despite the bittersweet words, Caroline smiles in the glimmering blue, the cresting glint of her smile like a moon, the perfectly envisioned moonlight of a honeymoon that will never be.

For years to come, Gillian will excoriate herself to no end for what she does next, despite a drunkenness that easily threw off the already loosened bond of her impulse control. She caresses Caroline’s face, allows her thumb to swoop over the cleft of her chin, and kisses her, tentative but lingering, until Caroline responds in kind and deepens it. The knotted pressure at the base of her spine increases, her greedy, shaking hands clasp Caroline’s neck.

Then a shaking of brambles, and toff voices shred the veil of blue: “Honestly, Hugh, I love it, it’s charming, but I think it’s just too small a venue.”

Gillian pulls away, Caroline rubs her temple and mutters a _fuck_ heard by no one but her stepsister _._

Someone, presumably Hugh, replies to his posh companion: “I was afraid you’d say that. Perhaps if we just make the guest list smaller—?”

“Ridiculous, we can’t do that.”

Jesus Christ, Gillian thinks. What have I done?

Fortunately, the toff tossers take a right turn down another pathway in the garden, so they narrowly avoid a face-to-face meeting. As the nattering voices fade away, Gillian closes her eyes and inhales one last bolt of blue.

“Where the hell are we?” Caroline mumbles.

“Um, we—we’re—” Feeling a serious stammering fit coming on, Gillian stops. It doesn’t help. “W-we’re in the garden. Best go back in now, it’s getting cold.”

“All right,” Caroline says cheerily—as if nothing has happened.

And maybe it was nothing to her. “You all right?” Gillian grunts.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You can walk?”

“Jesus, Gillian, I’m not an invalid.” Imperious—but still slightly swaying—Caroline takes off down the pathway in the general direction of the doors, to the siren call of the blue lights.

Inside the lobby, they encounter poor Randy who is not only still waiting for a taxi to arrive, but also for his wife to fully rouse herself and freshen up from a long nap. As he chatters amiably, Caroline gazes around the lobby area as if she had never before set foot in the bloody hotel, and Gillian hates herself for kissing her stepsister of all people, for putting this whole fucking plan into motion, for wanting what she cannot have.

And just when she thinks shit couldn’t possibly get any weirder, the ice sculpture rolls in.


End file.
